Saturday Film Club #8: Sucker Punch

Director: Zack Snyder

Country of origin and year of release: US, 2011

In this frankly mind boggling film, Zack Snyder - a man more known for superhero and zombie films than for psychological thrillers - applies the styles, codes and conventions of the superhero film to what can only be described as a 21st Century take on the Victorian era incarceration of difficult women and girls story. Think Avengers meets The Woman In White. 

It only just comes off and the main reason it works is because Snyder applies the same superhero action codes and conventions to the modern day incarceration of difficult girl protagonist bit of the plot as he does to the fantasy sequences, meaning the whole thing is incredibly high octane, over the top, and stylised to the hilt from the minute the film opens.

Baby Doll (all the characters have names like this - you just have to go with it...) has just lost her mother, has been abused by her stepfather (who, it is implied, was probably complicit in her mothers death) and has accidentally shot and killed the younger sister she was trying to protect from said stepfather. In shock, she is driven to a suitably gothic looking hospital where she is drugged, money changes hands, and she is admitted as a patient, having been declared insane. This all happens in the first five minutes.

Once inside the hospital, she finds herself performing menial work alongside a group of other young women who - like her - seem as sane as the next person. 

Then, it gets weird.

Instead of finding ourselves in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest territory, our heroine instead finds herself in some high stakes version of Moulan Rouge.

No, I still don't get that bit either.

Anyway, suspend your disbelief and strap in for the ride because it's about to get weirder still.

When Baby Doll is forced to dance for the various sleazy blokes who pay to be entertained by the mental hospital patients, she goes on a journey inside her head to make it bearable, taking the viewer with her. 

In her head, she goes on a series of quests, in which she needs to face various perils and defeat various foes in order to retrieve the items she and the other girls will need in order to escape the hospital. Initially she is fighting alone but, as she persuades the other inmates to help her, they also join her in her fantasy adventures. There's a standard samurai fantasy to begin with, then later a steampunk take on WWII, then a high stakes explosives on a train task. Not all of the quests occur without costs, and the reality behind the fantasy is often hard to take, especially when it goes wrong. 

On one level, you have to admire the sheer audacity of the plot, but there are aspects of it that do feel a bit queasy. There is the essential incarcerations of difficult women plot, and how it plays out, up to and including the way in which toxic masculinity, itself a form of madness, is allowed to roam unfettered within the hospital. There are many victims here, and the film skips lightly over a number of the many deaths that occur. Similarly, its very much up to the viewer to decide if the female characters are purely there to be viewed as sex objects by the viewer, as much as by the men who pay to exploit them within the film, or if they are fully rounded characters who, while exploited, are given agency and heroic characteristics. It is hard to form a consensus on that. 

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the film, or simply the moment when it lapses into poor taste, is the closing credits sequence. We have, quite literally, watched a man run rampant through an entire enclosed community, terrorising, exploiting, killing and profiting from multiple women. He has even forged signatures and caused medical procedures to take place illegally on a number of patients. How then is it OK to have that character dancing and lip syncing with the doctor, who he has undermined and taken advantage of professionally and (possibly) personally throughout the film as though this was a comedy? What The Actual Fuck?! As the young people say.

I have watched Sucker Punch about three or four times now, and every time the closing credits sequence has felt like a slap in the face. I think it's because, without it, the film would make a kind of sense and have a sense of resolution, however harrowing, but with it... it feels like the sucker punch of the films title. 

Sucker Punch is a film that does benefit from being watched more than once, and it does have a lot of style, a great soundtrack, cleverly executed and beautifully filmed moments within the narrative, as well as interesting things to say about power, control and madness. But it's fair to say that any aspect of the film that troubles you on the first watch will most likely still trouble you on future watches. 

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Saturday Film Club #7: Girl

Dominque Swain and Tara Reid as Andrea and Cybil

Director: Jonathan Kahn

Country of origin and year of release: US, 1998

I would never have encountered Girl (which has the feel of a straight-to-video release) had it not been for regularly watching it's trailer on a long forgotten VHS tape. I was intrigued by the films seemingly slapstick take on the 1990s grunge scene, and the perennial teenage coming of age film structure holding it all together.

Starring a post-Lolita Dominique Swain, Girl tells the story of Andrea Marr, a fairly quiet, strait-laced much loved only child of older, very over protective parents. Undistinguished and largely unnoticed at high school, Andrea is, in short, A Geek. 

That is until she meets Todd Sparrow (Sean Patrick Flanery), singer in local grunge band The Colour Green (surely a choice that would be firmly at the bottom of anyone's band name list, but still...), and develops such a severe crush on him that it borders on stalking. Her bass playing friend Cybil (Tara Reid) is unsurprisingly cynical about Andrea's sudden transformation from geek to aspiring grunge queen, and Andrea's (admittedly boring) friend Darcy (Selma Blair) is abandoned with little thought or consequence. Andrea's entree into the local grunge scene comes from Rebecca (Summer Phoenix), a lone grunge girl in her class at school, who knows all the cool bands and all the best venues, and essentially takes the unworldly Andrea in hand. On her way to snagging the weirdly uncharismatic Todd, Andrea falls into the path of Kevin (Channon Roe), a journalism student who provides her with her first (deeply unsatisfying) sexual experience. She also meets Todd's sister, Carla (Portia de Rossi), an effortlessly cool grunge queen who tells Andrea straight up that Todd is not for her: "You're too good for him; he doesn't deserve a girl like you." 

This grunge story has its roots in a serialised story of the same name, which first appeared in Sassy magazine before being published as a novel in 1994. The book's writer, Blake Nelson, later adapted the novel for screen, during which process the previously un-academic and un-motivated Andrea suddenly became Ivy League material, giving the inevitable relationship with Todd an extra layer of built in destruction that greatly enhances the plot.

Although the book Girl was written prior to cult US coming of age series My So-Called Life, the film Girl compares unfavourably to Winnie Holtzman's series. Tara Reid's Cybil is no Rayanne Graff and Swain's Andrea Marr is no Angela Chase. And yet the film does have some genuinely funny moments: 

A post coital and confused Andrea visiting the school counsellor's office to try and make sense of her first sexual encounter with Todd Sparrow is one, as is the first gig scene, which quite rightly eschews realism for atmosphere and comes away with a clumsy sense of charm in the process. In a related note, Summer Phoenix as Rebecca gets most of the best lines, including her introductory speech in which she accurately skewers musical sub genre snobbery. 

There are some interesting performances here, including de Rossi as the effortlessly cool Carla, and the aforementioned Phoenix as Rebecca, who would have made a much more interesting lead character than Swain's Andrea. 

Swain herself has a tendency to come across as whiney at moments when the viewer is meant to feel sympathy for her, but Reid as Cybil is at least periodically interesting in her performance, and Blair as the abandoned Darcy is... OK. Sadly, pretty much all of the male characters, up to and including Todd and Kevin, feel woefully underwritten. 

It would be an interesting 'What if?' to imagine what Girl would have been like had Phoenix's Rebecca been the lead character instead of Swain's Andrea. It would have made for a very different film, especially as Rebecca would have been far less likely to put up with Kevin's pseudo intellectual music journalist bollocks, and probably would have been clear headed enough, and had enough self esteem, to stay away from Todd Sparrow. It's unlikely that Hollywood would have been interested in that story though, and the result would probably have been closer to Daria than My So-Called Life, which would have been no bad thing.

Saturday Film Club #6: Even Cowgirls Get The Blues

Director: Gus Van Sant

Country of origin and year of release: US, 1993

Even at the time, Gus Van Sant's adaptation of Tom Robbins cult novel Even Cowgirls Get The Blues seems to have upset people. Mainly, it seems, for the unforgivable sin of not being My Own Private Idaho.

There are always going to be problems with managing expectation when it comes to adapting a well loved book, especially one that was structured in such a way that adapting it for screen would be a challenge. But these problems were clearly added to by the success of the aforementioned Van Sant directed My Own Private Idaho three years earlier. 

Like MOPI, ECGTB features a member of the Phoenix clan. Rain in this case, not River, who had died the year prior to this films release. I'm not sure whether this raised expectations or not, but the many perceived failings of ECGTB cannot be laid at Rain Phoenix's feet as she is clearly playing a blinder as the teenage cowgirl Bonanza Jellybean, love interest to Uma Thurman's hitch hiking model Sissy Hankshaw.

Robbin's presumably didn't take too much issue with what Van Sant did to his book as he appears as the narrater, but there are clear differences between book and film, including the cutting of almost all of the plot involving Julian Gitche (played by a much underused Keanu Reeves). Like the book, the film is fairly all over the place, meandering here and there at a gentle, picturesque pace that reflects its origins in the counterculture of the 1970s. There are aspects of the story that wouldn't stand scrutiny today, including a self proclaimed mystic to the counter culture known only as The Chink (played by Pat Morita).

When taken in the context of the mid 1990s, the film was refreshing for providing rare portrayals of LGBT+ characters; from the bi curious rich bohemian set who attempt to seduce Sissy into a threesome following her disastrous first meeting with Julian, to John Hurt's majestic The Countess, not to mention the all-female community of the cowgirls. As with the depictions of the counterculture though, it's likely that viewers opinions of these characters, and their motives, will have changed since the book was written and the film was made. None the least because the depictions of trans and lesbian characters in the book and the film were constructed in entirely different cultural contexts than today. 

Aside from this wider point about representation, there are some genuinely good performances in the film: The aforementioned Rain Phoenix, who brings a cheeky exuberance to her portrayal of Jellybean, but also - perhaps surprisingly - Roseanne Arnold in an hilarious cameo as a the fortune teller Madame Zoe, who is faced with the unenviable task of telling the child Sissy's increasingly desperate mother that Everything Is Going To Be OK. When faced with the child's unfeasibly large thumbs, she breaks character and exclaims in horror "Jesus fucking Christ..."

 "A husband" mutters Sissy's mother, frantically pushing wads of money towards Madame Zoe, "Is she going to find a husband?"

Zoe, knowing which side her bread is buttered, draws herself up into a suitably mystic trance. "I see men in your life" she says brightly, looking over at the young girl "I also see... women: Lots and lots of women"

At which point Sissy's horrified mother drags the wide eyed child out of the fortune telling booth.

The grown up Sissy, aided by her large thumbs, takes to hitchhiking like the proverbial duck to water, living exclusively on the road and treating it as a way of life. She is talent spotted by The Countess, who hires her as a model to pedal his vaginal douches and other feminine hygiene products, recognising in the unworldly Sissy the perfect ingenue. 

As the role of The Chink suggests, there were elements of the 1970s counter culture that might feel more troubling today than they would have done at the time. As well as the personality cults of the 1970s, this character also shows the hippies fetishisation of other cultures, just as Sissy's interest in the Native American community hints at a possible, more well intentioned, fetishisation as well as America's deeply troubled and problematic relationship with that community. Similarly, it's fair to say that the past is a different country when it comes to attitudes to women, and that the counterculture's attitude towards women no longer seems as forward thinking as it was portrayed at the time. 

This is by no means a perfect film. It is deeply flawed in a number of ways, and at a number of levels, and yet it is a film that you can return to and find new things in. As well as Phoenix's performance, we also have some fantastically over the top scenery chewing scenes from Lorraine Bracco as Delores Del Ruby, the cowgirls peyote guzzling seer. Thurman's own performance is less good, but it's not as terrible as it's sometimes portrayed. Arguably, she can do comedy, but the role of Sissy Hankshaw falls somewhere between comedy and drama, and it's for this reason, and because of the overall strangeness of the films narrative in general, that she struggles a bit. 

Watch it for Phoenix, but expect Rain, not River. 

Saturday Film Club #5: Whisper Of The Heart

Seiji and Shizuku

Director: Yoshifumi Kondō

Country of origin and year of release: Japan, 1995

Perhaps not one of the best known Studio Ghibli films, Whisper Of The Heart (adapted from Aoi Hiiragi's 1989 manga of the same name) tells the story of fourteen year old Shizuku Tsukishima, a book loving, library haunting girl with a clearly established love of reading and highly developed imagination. 

Over the course of the summer holidays, she becomes fascinated by the identity of the mysterious Seiji Amasawa, whose name keeps appearing in the list of borrowers for every library book she takes out.*

At the same time, she is becoming increasingly irked by her repeated chance encounters with a rude and sardonic boy of the same age, who always seems to meet her at her worst: Forgetting her dad's lunch box, leaving her lyrical re-working of John Denver's 'Take Me Home Country Road' on a park bench... 

Inevitably, he turns out to be Seiji Amasawa. 

While clearly written as a coming of age story of friendship and first love, Whisper Of The Heart is a beautiful anime not just because of the vividly evocative quality of the animation, nor even because of the central coming of age/romance storyline. It's beautiful for the way it celebrates the value of reading and imagination, and the importance of following your dreams: Shizuku and Seiji want different things. He wants to be a violin maker, she wants to be a writer and when Seiji gets the chance to travel to Cromona in Italy to try out as an apprentice, Shizuku is inspired by his dedication to attempt to write her first novel. It is not an unqualified success, but then neither is Seiji's visit to Cromona. What's important is that they tried, and that they both learnt something. 

Equally as important are minor characters, such as Shizuku's best friend Yuki and Sugimura, a sports loving boy known to Shizuku, who Yuki has a crush on. One of the most affecting scenes concerns the discovery of an unwitting love triangle between these three characters. 

There is also the mysterious cat statue, the Baron, owned by Seiji's uncle, whose story inspires Shizuku's literary efforts. The character of the Baron, along with the train travelling, dog baiting, cat Muta, would later return in the aptly titled The Cat Returns in 2002. 

Whisper Of The Heart is a sweet film which isn't overly sentimental, and which is complex and well developed enough to be compelling watching for all ages. Younger viewers will enjoy the cats, older viewers will be reminded of their own teenage dreams and aspirations, as well as the pangs and pains of first love. 

*Sadly a pleasure that was surely lost as soon as library management systems became computerised in the 1990s