The Dead Body In The Pool In The Beautiful Rented Villa

A Bigger Splash (2015) direted by Luca Gaudigno is like his superior I Am Love an exploration of the lives of people with too much time on their hands.  Splash is much, much slighter, a mere improvisation with a premise of stunning predictability.  

Of course, that is probably immaterial to Mr. Guadigno.  We Americans preach narrative economy above all, and drive headlong from story point to story point.  Texture is just for cinematographers or post-production sound mixers.  But like most European filmmakers, Mr. Guadigno is not afraid to slow down and let the rhythms of life flow by, which makes this film about 20-25 minutes longer than it would be under an American film director.

And then you would have lost one of the strangest and most interesting grace notes of the film.  I hope it's not too much of a spoiler to learn that one of the four principal characters pictured above dies in a pool before the film is over.  In an American picture, we would barrel ahead to the interrogations, the unanswered questions, the betrayals, etc., etc.  But we are in Italy, and this is a rented house.  And the film takes its time to show just how unpleasant and uncomfortable it would be to have someone die in the pool of your beautiful rented villa in Italy.  The uniformed policemen come and put up some very tatty crime scene tape.  Then the pool must be emptied, and that takes time.  A lot of time.  Time enough that one can go down to the police station and back and it's still not quite done and the body has still not been extricated.  The whole matter is just ugly and nasty and even if the dead person in the pool wasn't close to you, it still would throw an awful shadow over your vacation, as if someone had thrown sewage into the wine barrels.

I don't think many American filmmakers would have stopped to note that.  They want to focus on who and how and how that makes the protagonists feel, but that approach would have missed the comical upbeat at the end of the movie, in which the police chief insists on getting an autograph from vacationing rock star Tilda Swinton in the middle of an absolute downpour.  Does that explain anything?  No, but it helps make A Bigger Splash just a bit more special than it would have been.

Kicking history when it's down

It is difficult, observing the rules I have set for this blog (and which I often traduce), to limit myself to observations regarding Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011) and not to make judgments or to make silly jokes with the title, which, in my opinion, is just ASKING for it.

Everybody has to stop taking for granted how great Spielberg is with kids.  From the evidence of this movie, it's not easy, and this is from Stephen Daldry, director of Billy Elliott.  It's not just that the child character is irritating as conceived by the writer, he's irritating in practice.  No wonder his mother lets him roam around the city without supervision.  Anything to get him out of the house.

Second, making Max von Sydow a mute character just means you're too lazy to come up with a reason why this man has a funny accent.  Von Sydow has a beautiful and expressive voice.  There are a million better non-verbal actors than he.  I guess everyone was just thrilled with the novelty of von Sydow not speaking in English or in Swedish, and thought they were some jam-dandy acting.  He's not bad, but as a student of silent film, I've seen a lot better.

Third, dressing up an empty shaggy dog story with a great national tragedy does not give it significance -- it reduces its significance.  Having the boy's father die in the Twin Towers adds utterly nothing to the story; the only thing that matters is that he is dead.  The oblique visual suggestion that he died plummeting from the building just adds a forsting of grotesquerie onto a big Bad Taste Cake.

I recognize that this is a very weak blog entry, but I literally had trouble keeping my eyes on the screen and resisting the desire to look away and do something else.  A movie that is almost successful, though not quite, can sharpen one's powers of observation.  Something this wide of the mark seems to dull the senses.  Sorry.

How did these herrings get so red?

Unknown (2011) is another Liam-Neeson-running-around-a-European-city potboiler, so there is little to say about it with regard to film aesthetics or history. Just a few observations, then.

This film and X Men: First Class present conclusive proof that January Jones can't act. She has a petulant childish presence that works for her role on Mad Men, but nothing else to offer as an actor. She doesn't even move well, as you might expect of a former model. Can we throw the towel in on her?

Director Jaume Collet-Serra, who made a similarly botched and derivative horror film, Orphan, has a bad habit of shooting and editing ordinary events into little bitsy shots evidently intended to ramp up the suspense when what is happening on the screen is not and should not be a subject of suspense. Case in point - a baddy slides down the fire ladder from the roof down to the ground. It is presented in three separate cuts as if there was some question as to whether he would reach the ground, or perhaps suggesting that a surprise awaited him at the bottom. But no. He hits the ground and runs away. In fact, once he had left the roof, there is no reason whatsoever for the film to stay with him.

The whole film is a festival of red herrings, which do not serve as clever misdirection, but merely annoying clutter and lack of focus. The film huffs and puffs for a long time about the recovery of a briefcase which doesn't affect the story in the least.

The story turns mostly on Liam Neeson not being who he says (and thinks) he is. It takes him a really long time. About a minute into a really good but violent and destructive car chase through Berlin, replete with fancy stunt driving, I figured out that Neeson was not really a botanist. He didn't find out for another 15 or 20 minutes.

There is one moment of really good production design -- a cat and mouse scene in an art gallery filled with life-size photo portraits. Hitchcock would have known how to use the contrast between the real people and the images of people and the idea that the characters are presenting false images of themselves. Collet-Serra fumbles it.

Also, a filmmaker should have more respect for Frank Langella. He shows up, has a too-short scene with Bruno Ganz, delivers some information, half of which we had guessed, and then dies. That's a waste. You could get Dylan Baker or somebody to do that.

One innovation. You know that cliche where someone is trying to defuse a bomb, racing against time as the readout counts backward? And you know how they always finally succeed at the last moment? They don't do that here. It's almost worth seeing the whole movie.

Appealing to all the senses

Most Americans don't watch enough foreign films. I say that not because I'm a snob or I think you should be one, but if you're a film buff, watching a film in another language opens you up to the purest idioms of film, unencumbered by either the felicities or the clunkiness of language, and the distraction of jokes and flippancy. It's closer to watching silent film, but better, and yes, there's a synchronized music score, but more importantly, even if one doesn't understand each word as it is coming out, one can hear the inflections, the rhythms, the timbre of the speaking voice, coupled with the expressions of the face, the tilt of the head, the roll of a shoulder which convey the speaker's meaning at a deeper and truer level than the words selected.

And I Am Love (2010) isn't about talk very much, anyway. There are sights and sounds, sure, but I can't think of another film that endeavors to evoke smell, taste and touch so thoroughly as this. I Am Love will surely be remembered as the film in which a woman had a virtual orgasm and fell in love upon biting into a prawn. I mean, this was some terrific prawn. And the thing is, this woman did not expect to fall in love. She didn't want to fall in love. She had a husband and a family. A big family. A big rich family (her husband's). There was no good reason to fall in love except for this fantastic prawn.

I Am Love is one of the most sensual movies it is possible to see with your eyeballs. It is a film of textures, of surfaces, of warmth and cold, of brisk mountain air and seaside breezes, of flavors, some dark, some pungent, of the touch of fingers, a massage, a haircut, of lying in the tall grass with warm sun on top and sharp jabs of long grass on the bottom. That feeling is--I presume--intensified by having to rely on subtitles to follow the relatively minimal dialogue. And to complete one's verbal disorientation, Tilda Swinton speaks Italian with a Russian accent, as she is playing an emigre. In one scene it is evident that her character does not understand English! How completely appropriate then, that her character turns away from the seemingly obvious advantages of having married into a wealthy and prestigious Milanese family, to a romance with a humble chef, whose mode of living embodies all those sensual pleasures.

You cannot write about I Am Love without talking about the exciting and surprisingly suitable score from the works of concert composer John Adams. Adams, with Phillip Glass is probably our most influential composer today. He was grouped with Adams as a minimalist, for his accompaniments often rely on simply triadic harmonies, rejecting the harmonic density of mid-20th century music. But Adams has a gift for melody and development of form that Glass has not chosen to explore, and he is our best and most interesting opera composer alive. If you haven't heard his song-cycle/music I Was Looking At The Ceiling and Then I Saw The Sky is a neglected masterpiece. Go seek it out. You won't be sorry.

Adams has never licensed his music for work in film before, and did not write anything especially for the film. Instead the music was culled from his recorded catalog, and sequences were even written, shot and edited with pre-selected music in mind, most notably a sequence in which Swinton's character sort-of stalks her lover-to-be (who is a friend of her son's) through the streets of San Remo, finding herself in a Russian Orthodox Church, where she involuntarily stumbles onto her former self. The music both chugs (like the fabric mills which are the basis of the family fortune) and sings (like the souls of the lovers). If this movie can't make you want to go out and eat gourmet Italian food, it should make you seek out the work of John Adams.

There are a few ways a story of a wealthy middle-aged woman going off with her young lover can go. It can be a super-charged, rediscovering passion story like a Diane Lane movie, it can be a story of regret and despair--separation from her children and hurting her former spouse. And indeed there is tragedy in the story, but it is incidental to the main motion of the narrative, and in a way, releases Swinton's character to embrace her new path. The result is not melodramatic or romance, nor tragedy, but the difficult process of being reborn, of embarking a new life with no promises, no guarantees, but new hope of living one's true nature.

I try to refrain from straight-on reviewing or recommendations, but I Am Love, co-written and directed by Luca Guadagnino, is easily one of the best films of 2010 and I couldn't get to the end of the year without saying so. I am sorry I was not aware of it during its theatrical run and didn't see it on a big screen. If you do seek it out, try to watch it on a large monitor or projected and be sure to run the sound through a decent audio system. This movie goes straight past the intellect and goes straight for the senses like nothing I've seen.

In similar fashion, The Secret In Their Eyes (2009), last year's Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film, looks as though it's going to be a movie for the brain, but goes instead for the heart. It begins like an Argentinian version of TV shows like Law and Order or House, both programs that co-writer, director and editor Juan José Camapanella has worked on. A retired investigator is revisiting a case from 20 years before, but what is being revisited is not just a case, but the life lived prosecuting all those cases, and the opportunities lost or disregarded along the way. In particular, he is reflecting on The Girl That Got Away, his superior at work, in social class and in education, who married suitably and had a family. Now they re-meet to discuss his investigation into this old, dead case and discovers things may not be as old and dead as he thought they were.

The secret of the film is in its titles. The clues are not bits of carpet fibre and DNA. They are looks between the adoring and the adored, returned or not. There is a beautiful echo early in the film, when the investigator intuits the perpetrator of a violent crime by the look he is giving the victim in an old photograph. Only a few minutes later, we seem the same investigator in another old photo, giving the same look to his unobtainable adored. The picture above is a vivid demonstration of what this film does so well. The investigators have identified the violent offender, Gómez, but he has been released because he is a hired killer useful to the Peron regime (in power at the time). The prosecutors learn they have been bested and get on the elevator. A moment later, Gómez boards the elevator. Not a word is exchanged. Gómez loads and checks his gun. The threat is all the more undeniable for having remained verbally unstated. It is like the thriller film's equivalent to a Lubitsch moment.

One of the pleasures of this film is that everything is of a piece: the "top story", the crime investigation and the "under story", the lost romance or organically intertwined. The low-key, amber-toned cinematography, understated music score and Campanella's own crisp editing all fit together as if conceived all at once in a single burst of creativity. It is a film of discretion, of understatement, of respect for its audience, confident that the audience will put together the pieces of both stories and see the connections without being whacked over the head with them. It is a lean-forward, not a sit-back, film. Lead Roberto Darin reminds me of Joe Mategna, with even more soulful eyes, appropriate for a film about seeing.

The Dragon Tattoo series, Let The Right One In and The Secret In Their Eyes demonstrate (if it needed demonstrating) that a foreign language film can be a high-quality, relatively conventional commercial and accessible film. It need not be either experimental and off-putting or derivative and schlocky. All these films will receive (or have received) American remakes. Don't wait for them. Check out the originals. The week between the holidays is a great time for cocooning with movies. Put some foreign language films on your list. It's true that if your eyelids droop, and you miss a subtitle or two, you might feel lost. But have a sip of coffee and stay with it. Your eyes, and perhaps your other sensory organs, will thank you.

Let Lisbeth Be Lisbeth

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest (2009) provides a good argument for the American industrial method of film development and production. No American filmmaker (and we will see the proof of this as the American re-makes start to come out next year) would tolerate a film with so many foregone conclusions and so little suspense, even given one's natural expectations in a melodramatic mystery series.

Moreover, the Swedes have a touching faith in a government's goodwill and competence in the investigation of a rogue intelligence squad. (And I'm a progressive.) Sure, there are some bad guys hiding the crimes of the Soviet defector the recruited 40 years ago, but there is a whole gang of young, vigorous well-financed government investigators ready to take them down. If there was an American film (as it will be soon), the next thing would be the call from the shadowy senator or captain of industry speaking to an unseen official, telling them to shut that investigation down. Then the idealistic crimefighters would have to go rogue, pursuing the bad guys outside of the blessing of the law. But remember, this is Sweden, so ***SPOILER*** the good guys win without any opposition.

Then there's Lisbeth's trial and hearing. The bad guys have accusations and false dignity. Lisbeth and her lawyer have mountains of incriminating evidence against the bad guy so -- surprise -- they win.

Worst of all, Lisbeth is reduced to a passive object for most of the movie, and only gets decked out in full Salander-goth rig about 1-1/2 hours into a 2-1/2 hour movie. And she gets into her full leather-and-razor-blades gear in order to...go to court. It makes no sense -- in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, she proved herself an excellent and dogged investigator. How come she's not put to work to investigate her own case? Worst of all, the key to the whole case is discovered by a minor character called Plague, who is completely unnecessary and redundant in the narrative. There's nothing Plague does that could not have plausibly done by Lisbeth. (I hope the American remake writer reads this!) Overall, the hard-won improvements of the second installment over the first, especially in making Lisbeth the center of the action, and the person who can resolve her own problems and questions, has been dealt away by a rather flabby and inefficient approach to suspense.

There is an action sequence, which comes in the oddest place, at the end of the movie after most of the story is over. It's somewhat satisfying, but we've already seen Lisbeth vindicated, so it is really no more than an amusing coda.

I presume most of this narrative lumpiness comes from the source novels. Larsson has the strangest procedure as a writer of suspense and action. Usually the protagonist makes a clear plan toward his goals, then turns a corner and complications and problems stretch out into a seeming abyss before them. But Larsson reverses that. When you can see a long and difficult path of difficult complications and obstacles on the way to the goal, Larsson suddenly shuts that down. How will Lisbeth escape the clutches of her homicidal father, who is only a few doors down in the same hospital? One envisions a complex sequence of cat-and-mouse as father evades the rather thin defenses of the Swedish security forces. But no, some guy we've never met before comes and shoots the old man in the head, then shoots himself and we're left saying --wait...is this story over now? Nope, because Larsson has a deep sack of stuff from out of nowhere that he continues to reach into.

Clearly Larsson never took an American playwrighting or screenwriting course, in which 3rd act threats must be made evident in the 1st act, and every little character detail pays off, e.g., the hero's hobby of whittling, as we saw in the second scene of the movie, means that he will whittle a way out of his predicament in the second-to-the-last scene. Americans write movies the way Indians live off the bison -- every little scrap is used. This is why, although Europeans are producing more and more commercial blockbusters, at least on their own continent, those hits have to be rewritten and remade here. (The exception here is Jean-Luc Besson, who clearly has studied mainstream American filmmaking with passion and insight.) It's not just the language of the words, it's the entire language of narrative which must be adjusted for American expectations.

Taking command

The film adaptations of the Millenium series which began with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo switched directors for the second installment, The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009), with great success. What is impressive this time is often what is omitted.

Case in point: The film does not end with the usual order-is-restored conclusion typical of the mystery-thriller genre. In fact, the clean-up of the climatic violent sequence has not even begun when the film fades out. Also missing is the scene where everyone sits down and figures out the difference pieces of the story they know fit together and thus explain it all for the audience. If you're not going to take the trouble to keep up, this movie won't help you. Like Lisbeth, you better just go look it up on the Internet.

All of which demonstrates greater trust in the audience than demonstrated in the first installment. Played With Fire has two other elements not found in its predecessor: colors other than gray, including flesh tones, and the dominating presence of Lisbeth as played by Noomi Rapace, who seemed like a guest star in the first film, but here takes command as she should do, given both the strength of the character and Rapace's own strong presence.

Paradoxically, this second film serves as a kind of origin story, although it is chronologically after the events of the first film. I'll spare the details, as this one of those films in which the revelation of information is the principal activity of the plot, interspersed with bouts of violence. None of the violence is as explicit and repellent as in the first film -- but is that a good thing? Shouldn't violence, especially violence against women be repellent? Nonetheless, this time there's a sprinkling of martial arts and gun fu that edges toward more conventional "movie-movie" violence. That "movie" feeling is heightened by the principal thug's resemblance to "Jaws" played by Richard Kiel in the Bond movies.

But the greater professionalism of this entry also binds the top story (the crime to be unraveled) and the underlying story (who and what is Lisbeth and how did she get this way) into a more cohesive fabric than the first film, which seemed at times like two unrelated films. In Dragon Tattoo, the mystery of the missing girl in the Northern village seemed to have little to do with the Lisbeth's disturbing story, and she solves the mystery because it is an interesting job. Here the murders are inextricably bound up in someone's animosity to Lisbeth, and she has a moral duty to find and punish the killer. (Oddly enough, the evidence against Lisbeth's own persecutor, which is set up in this film as though it where something that might be lost or destroyed becomes irrelevant in rather short order. In fact, the entire threat to her shifts in this film, and one wonders if it will survive to Part 3.)

Director Alfredson has a smoother camera style and there is witty and perky cutting by Mattias Morheden. The music, like the earlier installment, is still overstatedly ominous in the Hollywood mode. Over the years I have observed that the use of music -- when and how it is used as well as the actual style of the music -- does more to date a film than any other single element, including the women's hairstyles. Most audiences can look past matters of passing fashion, but a crashing, thumping music score can seriously interfere with the audience's engagement. It is hard to think of a film which suffered badly from having too few or too subtle music cues.

The damaged Lisbeth put me in mind of the neglected girl at the center of The Curse of the Cat People (1944) a strange death-obsessed fantasy film which RKO had ordered up, hoping to get a sequel to the straight-on horror of Cat People.

Young Amy has forged a relationship with his father's deceased former wife, who gives her the loving attention she is missing from her own parents. Naturally, the adults around her treat Irina's appearance as that of an imaginary friend. But she finds another adult, Julia Farren, who encourages Amy's belief in magic and in making connections with the unseen world. Unlike Amy, who sees the dead who are not here, Julia cannot see her own daughter, whom she insists has died and been replaced by an impostor.



There is an enchanting scene with Irena on Christmas Eve, which would be season-appropriate, but finally Amy's father, whom Amy cannot reach emotionally, orders her to stop seeing Irena, and in a haunting scene that I can't embed, but I can link to here, they say farewell. The full palette of the tricks of studio filmmaking are on display here, in all their artificial splendor.

Amy goes to look for her friend one more time and stumbles into the home of Julia and her daughter, and inadvertently heals that family -- but through death, in a scene which could be called by horrific and cathartic. Producer Val Lewton is definitely toying with the boundaries of the horror genre. Amy learns she must make her own path through life and not rely on those who have gone before, and that she must live in the here and now and with her own parents and friends. She begins to take command of her own life by passing through fantasy, just as Lisabeth had to pass through violence.

Sherlock Mom

As most of our really clever crime dramas have escaped the big screen for the small, filmmakers from overseas have been rushing in to fill the gap. Time was when all foreign films seen here were art films, and entertainment stayed home, but that is no longer the case, given the huge void in diversion for intelligent adults found in the local Google-plex. Mother (2009) is a wonderful twisty exemplar from South Korea. Or at least it comes wrapped as one -- a crime procedural with the twist of a mother who must,against the odds and the opposition of the police, solve a crime to exonerate her beloved and mentally disabled son, who is charged with the crime. It could have been a Lifetime movie.

But what director Joon-ho Bong and his co-writer Eun-kyo Park have in mind is a black satire on the myth of ever-powerful Mother Love. At first, we are absorbed in the details of her investigation, and there are lovely details planted all the way through which pay off later in the manner of Hitchcock, e.g., the mother's acupuncture practice, the kind junkman, even the peculiar prologue in which the mother dances in a field in a rather non-motherly way, as if to start the entire film off with a wink at the audience.

We see the film at a disadvantage here, for the actress playing the mother, Kim Hye-ja is a well-known and beloved mother-type figure in South Korea. Think of your favorite TV mom, be it from Happy Days and Leave it to Beaver. Then imagine that actress treading the line between fierce and protective love, to obsession to, well, you really should see the film yourself. That almost imperceptible shift provides the wicked fun of Mother. Bong has been making monster films prior to this, and he doesn't seem to have stopped, abetted by the brilliant work of Kim.

Can't say why, but one of the strongest impressions I carry away from the film is what one finds under the characters' feet. The film travels up and down the class structure, from mother and son living at a survival level, to the abundance of a golf course, the anonymous sterility of a police station, to an abandoned hovel. The striations in Korean society seem to be defined by the difference between pavement, tatami mats, country club grass, police-office linoleum, the firm mud of a well-trodden path and the soft mud that marks an area where few trod. I can't think that's an accidental impression, for as one might expect of Asian film, the overall tone of the film is complete control in all its effects, which lends exhilaration to its final reveal.

I am going to be looking at more of Joon-ho Bong's films and writing about them here, that's for sure.

Where do ghosts go when they die?

Roman Polanski has never made a movie that is less than eminently watchable. I have taught Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown in my film courses, and lessons learned in those films are applied at times in The Ghost Writer (2010), Polanski's entry into the paranoid political thriller genre. (Although given Polanksi's origins and his life since, I suppose all his films are paranoid thrillers. Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean people aren't after you.)

The film's title outside the States is "the Ghost" and that's how Ewan MacGregor's character keeps introducing himself, most ominously in the scene pictured above, when he simply says, "I'm your ghost," announcing that Pierce Brosnan's Tony-Blair-like character is already dead, which politically speaking he is.

Polanski is the master of what is not shown. The most famous example is in Rosemary's Baby as Ruth Gordon, having a secretive telephone conversation leans just out of shot, which caused much of the audience during the first run to physically lean over, evidently hoping they could see around the corner on the movie screen. There is a bravura example in The Ghost Writer as a folded note is passed hand to hand within a crowd. Polanski chooses to show only the hands and the shoulders being tapped. The fact of a note being passed seems to excite surprise or consternation, but we have no faces to show us this, just body language. But over the course of this very long shot, our desire to know the content of the note ramps up until the pressure is almost unendurable. Too bad the actual note itself is sort of flat compared to the build-up.

Similarly the climax of the film and the final revelation takes place just off-screen, although what has happened is clear and does not need to be shown directly to be understood. If you haven't seen the film and you want to--and you might want to becuase there are rewards to be found--be advised that Polanski's ending (which is meant to be a shock) has returned to the ethos of "forget it Jake, it's Chinatown." In effect, Polanski says, all effort to discover the truth, to effect justice are feckless and almost ludicrous. The result is a highly unsatisfying, disappointing and perhaps even predictable downbeat 70s ending--albeit in a well-designed shot of which Hitchcock would be proud.*

Which solves the final mystery: why a film which for 127 minutes of its 128 minute length seems like a rattlingly good post-Hitchcock thriller with a major star and a raft of well-known supporting players should have disappeared at the box office this spring. You just can't tell an audience it's all hopeless and expect them to like it. At least not since the mid-70s, anyway.
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* We can't discount the possibility that Polanski may have come his conclusions about truth and justice because of his own personal history as a long-time fugitive, although I think there is no hidden mystery about the acts which are the substance of the charges against him. The only argument is as to the just punishment therefor.

Brain trust

For a film about the development of trust, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2009) doesn't trust its audience very much. It turns out the lights, turns up the music, and bangs us over the head with some of the most grotesque and nauseating personal violence ever seen in a mainstream movie. It purports to condemn violence against women, then serves up a big steaming bowl of it, including attacks on and by the title character (who is not the central character).

Most of the film occupies that newly-established place bridging mystery, thriller and horror film, pioneered by Silence of the Lambs and continued with 7even. The addition of horror elements means not only horrific depictions of the murders, previously only described in more polite mysteries, but also violence upon one or more central characters, and thereby to be experienced by the audience.

That accretion of new genre conventions is almost necessary, because once the audience is past the preliminary investigation into piles of original documents and photos, the principal mystery becomes fairly easy to guess--I did so, and I'm terrible at solving mysteries. Thus, the final bursts of violence are perversely welcome after a long becalmed period, incorporating an improbably romance between the protagonist, a middle-aged reporter and the title character, a badly damaged young woman who has discovered a talent and passion for hacking. After that, there is a very limp resolution of the "outer" plot, in which the inner story has been nested. Thus, Dragon Tattoo has some unintended common ground with Inception, in their mutual Russian-nesting-doll structure.

The trust trope is thoroughly infused into the narrative: most institutions in this universe betray and degrade the people they are meant to serve. Government employees, businessmen, guardians of minors, lovers, fathers, brothers--none of them are trustworthy. It's a miracle that Blomqvist or Lisbeth can look anyone in the eye. And although the romance does not necessarily pan out, it's very existence, though brief, is a spiritual triumph.

The color palette is washed out as is de rigeur these days to indicate "atmosphere," and the production design is oppressively drab. Presumably this was deliberate--everyone seems desperate to find happiness or joy in this very bleak world. This movie's going to kill Swedish tourism.

Finally, although this is not a reflection on the film itself (which is what I try to confine myself to), one must applaud the producers' boldness in committing to filming the entire trio of mysteries at once. The Americanized version will not be done that way--there will be a slow, tentative stab at the initial installment, then a reluctantly made decision to go ahead, by which time the original actors and/or director will not be available, or perhaps the series will be abandoned incomplete due to the natural gutlessness of the American film finance market.

And will the villains in America be Nazis? That does not have the resonance in the States that it has for Europeans, who were faced with the actual option to join the party. American Nazis are fringe cuckoos. European Nazis could be either evil or careerists (like Herbert von Karajan).

But then driving out ambiguity is what American mainstream filmmaking is all about. At least they hired David Fincher for the remake, so we can hope.

Just waiting for that kitchen sink to show up

Murder at the Vanities (1934) is the kind of film that only a producer could concoct. It's part whodunnit, part hokum comedy (with Jack Oakie and Victor MacLaglen competing to be Biggest Hambone of 1934), part musical (featuring Kitty Carlisle, just a year before climbing aboard with the Marx Brothers) and part skin show.

The picture takes its title, setting and aesthetic inspiration from one of the sleaziest showmen in theatrical history, Earl Carroll, creator of Earl Carroll's Vanities, a review like the Ziegfeld Follies or the Shubert Passing Show, which appeared in new editions on an annual or near-annual basis in the 1920s and 30s. Carroll was as close as one could get to smut peddler within mainstream entertainment of the early 20th century. His mob connections got him a jail term when he perjured himself to protect some bootlegger buddies, which added to his notoriety. He was also a well-known cheapskate.

Murder at the Vanities partakes of Carroll's spirit, tossing together a wild variety of entertainment, plenty of girls, not much money spent on either top-tier talent or underwear for the women. The film has become notorious on the YouTubes because of a song called "Sweet Marijuana;" there are also a couple of numbers from the Duke Ellington Orchestra, still in its first generation, and yet to experience the Swing Boom that Benny Goodman kicked off in 1935. Ellington still swings hard, especially in something called "The Rape of the Rhapsody," which would an example of surrealism in music, if such a thing existed.

Clearly, the producers didn't care much about the mystery. The police can't be bothered stopping the show, even with a murder backstage, and the investigation seems to be conducted by having the producer (Oakie) and the cop (McLaglen) alternately yell at each other and ogle girls. Meanwhile, characters run around on stage with both fake and real guns, without any intervention by the authorities. What could this show have looked like to its audience?

On top of all this, some German guy debuts the song "Cocktails for Two," soon to fall victim to Spike Jones, and Kitty Carlisle sings, referring to the Earl Carroll girls, "Where Do They Come From and Where Do They Go?"

Nobody has an answer for that one.