Saturday Film Club #13: The Big Sleep

Director: Howard Hawks

Country of origin and year of release: US, 1946

While rightly cited as a film noir classic, The Big Sleep has nonetheless regularly been criticised for having an unfathomable plot. Adapted from the Raymond Chandler novel of the same name, The Big Sleep was the first of Chandler's novels to feature detective Phillip Marlowe. 

Starring Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as Vivian Regan, the elder of General Sternwood's two wild daughters, this film was the second pairing of Bogie and Bacall, following on from To Have And Have Not two years earlier. It's widely reported that the minimising of Martha Vickers role as Carmen Sternwood, the younger of the two sisters, was as a direct result of the chemistry between Bogart and Bacall. It might also be for this reason that the end of the film is ever so slightly tweaked, giving it a more sentimental, romantic feel than was the case with the book. Overall though, this is a faithful adaptation of Chandler's novel.

The story begins with Marlowe paying a call on a prospective client, the afore mentioned General Sternwood. In the course of his visit he also meets the giggling Carmen Sternwood, who makes something of a play for him, and discovers that General Sternwood is being blackmailed... again. Then there is the matter of Sean Regan, husband to Vivian and a protegee of the General, who has disappeared. 

Part of the reason why the plot can be regarded as confusing (and one of the reasons why the film repays repeated viewing) is because there isn't just one plot. There's at least two, possibly three or four, and they interact with and entwine each other in a series of increasingly confusing ways that it can be very hard to keep track of. But... it almost doesn't matter. The fact that it constantly keeps you guessing is a key part of the film's charm, that and it's incredible sense of tension. 

There's a particular scene in which Marlowe is in an apartment trying to interview a witness, only to be interrupted by a knock at the door and the entrance of a semi deranged already established character. Once that person has been got rid of, Marlowe resumes his investigation, but there is another knock at the door... and you feel a real shiver down the spine from the sense of impending doom that this moment brings. 

Similarly, the script (and its source material) is so well crafted and developed that even minor characters are vivid enough for you to find yourself caring disproportionately about what happens to them.

Part of the fascination of film noir comes from watching the ways in which film had to find ways to negotiate the censorship self-imposed on Hollywood by the Hays code. How to navigate a swamp of violence and vice without breaching the moral standards Hollywood had chosen to impose on itself (at least on screen). You can see that tension in a noir classic such as Double Indemnity, not just because the crime is punished, but also in the language used between hero and femme fatale, and by what is shown and not shown. Similarly, there are aspects of noir that might seem weirder, or more shocking, today then they perhaps would have done at the time: The fascist collaboration that runs as an undercurrent beneath Gilda (the misogyny is, sadly, more of a given), the wilful disregard for preserving crime scenes (pretty much any noir, but especially, especially Laura, in which Dana Andrews cheerfully traipses all over the titular heroines home, and practically moves in, for a good fortnight or more) and the overall sense in which the spectre of World War II hangs over these films (most of them, but Witness For The Prosecution is a good tangible example of this.)

These are not nice stories; because these were not nice times. Discussions and debates around the representation of men and women in noir are well established, and are no doubt better, and more thoroughly discussed, elsewhere but it is worth noting that it was the 1944 psychological thriller Gas Light that gave us the phrase gaslighting and that, while not regarded as a noir, it was released a mere two years before The Big Sleep.

As for gender roles within The Big Sleep, Chandler's Marlowe tends to adhere to his own code as regards how he treats people, meaning that the women in Chandler books and their many adaptations tend not to come off as badly in terms of fate and characterisation as they might have done elsewhere at the time. Marlowe is a likeable guy; not a Peter Whimsey by any means, but certainly not an arsehole. More a lightly tarnished type than a full scale knight in shining armour: "Marlowe; the shop soiled Galahad" as a doctor in The High Window puts it. Similarly, Chandler's men and women tend to be a mixture of the good and the bad: Marlowe doesn't think much of either of the Sternwood women, but he comes to feel something (albeit something rather complex) for Vivian and doesn't seem to find it in himself to despise the exasperating Carmen. Indeed, for much of the film, he finds himself running around after and rescuing both of them to varying degrees. Similarly, there is a murder that takes place in the film that affects him more than any of the others and, with the viewer watching events unfold through his eyes, it's easy to see why. 

The Big Sleep wasn't Marlowe's first on screen appearance, in fact you can find out more about the various ways in which the Phillip Marlowe stories were used and abused by Hollywood over on Tor.com, but it was the first - and only - time that he was played by Bogart. I haven't seen any of the other screen adaptations of Chandler's work so I can't comment on how well The Big Sleep compares to the on screen adaptation of Farewell My Lovely (another Marlowe classic), which was released under the title Murder, My Sweet in 1944. I would say that those two (and perhaps The Long Goodbye) are my favourite Marlowe stories though, so I suspect Murder, My Sweet would be worth checking out. 

Saturday Film Club #12: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

Sheila Vand as 'The Girl'

Director: Ana Lily Amirpour 

Country of origin and year of release: US, 2014

This is one of those films where you find yourself thinking "Surely it can't possibly be as good as the trailer?" 

But it so is. 

I suspect that Amirpour's art house feminist vampire western hybrid, which also nods to 1950s Hollywood and James Dean films, is going to be the film for which my abilities as a would-be film blogger will be the most stretched and tested: It's quite possible that I will come spectacularly unstuck in the process. With that in mind, I feel very comforted by the fact that the always reliable Mark Kermode has written one of his most elegant salutes to A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, which you can read here. As such, I feel I have a safety blanket to cling to should I need it.

It's easy to feel intimidated about writing about A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. Mainly because it's so bloody good, but also because it successfully juggles three film genres that I'm not entirely familiar with and  because it's set in a fictional Iranian lawless ghost town and the anti-heroine is a skateboarding, chador wearing avenging vampire. It's also entirely in Persian, but I feel that subtitles are less of a reason to be intimidated. 

The tellingly named Bad City is a stark wasteland and the sense of desperation and foreboding is enhanced by Amirpour's decision to film in black and white. Bad City has the same sense of bleakness and brutality as the favelas of Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund's City Of God, but without the cheerful bits. Bad City is a place where young men have their cars repossessed to pay their fathers drug debts, where sex workers are menaced by pimps and forcibly injected with heroin, and where opportunity and fun are extremely hard to come by. It is, as Kermode acknowledges, a place sorely in need of an avenging angel. "What catches everyone off guard is that this avenging angel should take the form of Sheila Vand."

Vand as The Girl both imbues the image of the chador clad muslim girl with a sense of predatory menace and subverts existing stereotypes of muslim womanhood not only by casting her as the predator rather than the preyed upon, but by having her use her seemingly demure Islamic womanhood as a lure to draw in and capture various predatory men. As a character it's striking just how little dialogue she has in a film that is notably sparse in dialogue. 

By contrast, Arash Marandi, styled here as the central male protagonist (The Boy) in the form of "The Persian James Dean", fulfils the role of would be love interest for The Girl, but also someone to be protected by her. She first encounters him in a distressed state on his way home from a party at which his privileged would be lover has given him sparse attention. He is disorientated and vulnerable, dressed as Dracula and, ironically, in need of rescuing by this most unlikely of rescuers. 

There follows a series of intensely awkward encounters between the pair, notable for their tenderness amidst the brutality of life in Bad City and the many, many killings. 

As visually distinctive as Amirpour's film is, it's also got an equally distinctive soundtrack which features everything from 80s electro to modern indie rock, eastern dance music and the western soundtrack music. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night has all the hallmarks of a classic, but I think it's still - alas - more of a cult film at present. 

Saturday Film Club #11: Antique Bakery

Director: Min Kyu-dong

Country of origin and year of release: South Korea, 2008

Adapted from a Japanese manga, Antique Bakery tells the story of wealthy, privileged Jin-hyeok (Ju Ji-hoon) who, after  having led something of a playboy lifestyle for much of his young life, announces to his family that he intends to settle down by opening a cake shop. His reasoning? Women like cakes, therefore he'll be able to meet lots of girls.

As you might expect, his reason for wanting to open a cake shop isn't as straight forward as all that. The audience is given to understand, very early on, that something terrible and traumatic happened to him as a young child. We don't know exactly what but the scene in which he violently vomits up the cake made by his patisserie chef, and the flashback to his adolescence, in which he equally violently rejects the clumsily expressed love of school boy Min Seon-woo (Kim Jae-wook) offer some kind of clue. He is, at least initially, and to some extent throughout the film, an obnoxious character, but he's also compelling and sympathetic in his quest to understand how he ended up the way he is. In the depiction of this central character and in the other three central characters in this film, Min Kyu-dong doesn't shy away from depicting male fragility and vulnerability alongside male bravado and machismo.

Min Seon-woo, Jin-hyeok's spurned schoolmate, is recruited by him as a patisserie chef and - despite having bounced back more than admirably following his crushing rejection by Jin-hyeok - his love god status contrasts with the blowback from some of his more impulsive sexual decisions. This has led to a certain amount of criticism for the film in that Min Seon-woo is proclaimed as "A gay of demonic charm" who can quite literally charm the pants off any man, suggesting the stereotype of the sexually promiscuous, predatory gay man.

Due to the wider complexities of Min Seon-woo's character, which quickly become apparent, I feel that the stereotype is exploited rather than confirmed to. Min Seon-woo might be enjoying an extremely robust sex life, but he's also regularly sacked from his various chef jobs, leaving behind him a trail of inconsolable kitchen staff who have fallen in love with him. While Min Seon-woo's sexual magnetism is largely played for laughs, it is also used to make important points: He was subjected to a volley of homophobic verbal abuse by Jin-hyeok when he made his clumsy confession of love and, rather than go home and cry about it, he instead went to a gay bar, got shitfaced, and had an epiphany that he didn't have to be another kind of gay stereotype: Emotionally tortured, alone, and isolated. 

The baby faced ex boxer Yang Ki-beom (Yoo Ah-In) soon joins the cake shop, Antique, as a cake obsessed trainee patisserie, under the watchful eye of Min Seon-woo. While he initially presents as a cheeky, greedy, brat it becomes apparent, following a confrontation with a customer, that he too has secrets he would rather not talk about. 

While the overall mood of Antique Bakery is often as light as the patisserie, verging on camp at times, it does - as I've already hinted - have a series of darker undertones. Central to this is an unfolding crime story that at first seems to have little to do with the antics at Antique but which, in the end, becomes firmly entwined with that establishment and its staff. 

We know that there is something lurking in Jin-hyeok's past that he clearly needs to deal with, and we know that it is tied up in some way with the constant presence of the fourth member of staff at Antique: Nam Su-yeong (Choi Ji-ho), a clumsy young man and supposed childhood friend of Jin-hyeok, who also appears to serve as his bodyguard. But who, or what, is being protected? And from whom?

While it has been said that the plot doesn't quite work, I'd say instead that this is a film that needs to be watched more than once. Not only will it make more sense on the second viewing but you will also take different things from it, and notice different things. For this is a film that improves with repeated viewing. 

Saturday Film Club #10: Kamikaze Girls

Kyôko Fukada and Anna Tsuchiya as Momoko and Ichigo

Director: Tetsuya Nakashima

Country of origin and year of release: Japan, 2004

Adapted from Novala Takemoto's novel, and known in Japan as Shimotsuma Story, Kamikaze Girls has been justly recognised as one of the main cultural channels for the popularisation of Japanese street fashions abroad, particularly the Lolita fashion trend. 

In this fast paced, inventively structured, vivid screwball comedy/female buddy movie, we are introduced to Momoko; a demure, dutiful, Rococco obsessed Lolita, and Ichigo; a loud, aggressive, gobbing motorbike obsessed Yanki. As fully paid up members of their respective fashion tribes, they should, by rights, have nothing to do with each other but - given that they live in the remote, rural rice paddy field dominated town of Shimotsuma in Ibaraki Prefecture - they are thrown together by virtue of being The Only Weirdos In The Village. 

Momoko, we know from the start, had very different beginnings: The result of an inelegant, drunken one night stand between a night club hostess and a hopeless aspiring yakuza in a decidedly more gritty, gangster orientated town, she fell in love with Lolita fashions following a trip to the famous Baby The Stars Shine Bright boutique in the hippest part of Tokyo. Her evolving Lolita look was equally as at odds with the fashion trends in her hometown ("It was tracksuit country") as they are with the credulous locals in Shimotsuma, the quiet town she and her father are forced to flee to following his over ambitious adventures as a fashion counterfeiter. 

She meets Ichigo when, in an attempt to raise funds to feed her fashion habit, she begins quietly selling her fathers counterfeit Versace clothes. The two fail to hit it off and yet Ichigo returns, again and again, and attempts to befriend the aloof Lolita. Momoko, being more interested in Rococco France and embroidery, cannot understand why Ichigo keeps on coming back but it slowly becomes apparent to the audience, if not to Momoko, that Ichigo - despite her posturing - is, at heart, a friendly girl who has seen something in this curiously attired fellow misfit that she likes and admires. 

There follows a series of adventures involving Pachinko, embroidery, an unusually coiffed gangster, an odyssey to Tokyo's ultra hip Daikanyama district, and the entrusting of Ichigo's beloved Kamikaze coat (synonomous with her all girl biker gang tribe, The Ponytails) to Momoko. Somewhere along the way, a friendship is formed, and new loyalties and priorities develop, leading to difficult choices. 

One of the reasons why Kamikaze Girls is such a great watch is its penchant for breaking the fourth wall and messing with narrative structures. When Momoko feels the narrative might be getting a bit slow for the viewer, or there's going to be some backstory coming up, she often turns to camera and signposts the incoming hand break turn. Examples would include the story of her father being told in the form of a short tragi-comic documentary which is shown, to much hilarity, on a TV screen in the station waiting room as she awaits her train. Similarly, Ichigos back story is relayed in a helpful summary, voiced by Momoko, and there is even a short animation detailing the recent history of Ibaraki's girl biker gangs, shown as an intermission feature while Momoko and Ichigo are dining out at the unfeasibly named Forest of the Aristocrats. 

Despite her singularly lone wolf, hard boiled, independent character, Momoko is an oddly likeable character. Even when she's being bad, she's selfish rather than awful, and the final selfless act she commits to at the films climax is - while out of character - a choice that the viewer can fully support.

Similarly, while Tsuchiya's performance as Ichigo often feels over the top, it works because both she and Fukada are playing flamboyantly cartoonish stereotypes that they then, over the course of the film, imbue with humanity, complexity and likability. 

Somewhere in the hectic, technicolour joyride that follows, a very likeable screwball comedy emerges. 

Saturday Film Club #9: Pom Poko

Director: Isao Takahata

Country of origin and year of release: Japan, 1994

Pom Poko features, at its heart, an environmental and conservation theme that is common to a number of Studio Ghibli productions, most notably the excellent Princess Mononoke. You can also see nods to it in Nausica, My Neighbour Totoro and Whisper Of The Heart, amongst others. 

It is best characterised as a nostalgia for pre-industrial age Japan, conveyed through a gentler way of life, and a sense of harmony with nature, often depicted in the form of wood spirits and similar creatures. On the other hand, nature is often shown to be untamable and unpredictable, while still needing protection. Often, as is the case with Princess Mononoke, there is depicted the ultimate destruction of nature, and a sense of intense sorrow and grief at that destruction.

In Pom Poko, the reason for this reoccurring theme quickly becomes apparent: The film takes place in the 1960s, at a time when Japan's industrial boom saw rapid industrialisation spread from cities such as Tokyo to the nearby countryside.

Much as Richard Adams Watership Down sought to depict the tragedy of rapid industrial growth at the expense of the environment through the eyes of rabbits, so Pom Poko tells the story of a similar tragedy through the eyes of raccoons. Like Adams' rabbits, their territory and homes are being destroyed by industrialisation but, unlike the rabbits, the raccoons elect to stay and fight. Specifically, through a number of schemes, they try to chase away the humans, to make them give up and let them stay on the land in peace. It is fair to say that it doesn't end well. 

As with Watership Down, there are mystical elements to the story, and - to a certain extent - collaboration and assistance with other animal species. There is also the game changing element that is the raccoon's ability to transform themselves into humans. 

Like a lot of Studio Ghibli, it's a film that is by turns funny and very sad. It also has an epic fantasy feel to the narrative that at times feels as though it might escape the confines of the story, but which it never does. In the raccoons story we see a tale that feels all too human in many ways, dealing as it does with themes such as unexpected and unwelcome change, things outside of our control, and grief. It is utterly absorbing.