Village of the damned

Above: Elizabeth Berkley (Click to enlarge.)

I’d like to join Dennis Cozzalio in celebrating the 15th birthday of Showgirls by offering the following Blogathon contribution I originally posted on January 11, 2006:

Showgirls (1995 — 131 min. — UA) Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Written by Joe Eszterhas. Cinematography by Jost Vacano. Edited by Mark Goldblatt and Mark Helfrich. Starring Elizabeth Berkley, Kyle MacLachlan, Gina Gershon, Robert Davi, and Lin Tucci as Henrietta ‘Mama’ Bazoom.

Asked in an interview what films and filmmakers he admires, director Jacques Rivette said something I didn’t expect to hear:

“I've seen [Starship Troopers] twice and I like it a lot, but I prefer Showgirls (1995), one of the great American films of the last few years. It's Verhoeven's best American film and his most personal. In Starship Troopers, he uses various effects to help everything go down smoothly, but he's totally exposed in Showgirls. It's the American film that's closest to his Dutch work. It has great sincerity, and the script is very honest, guileless. It's so obvious that it was written by Verhoeven himself rather than Mr. Eszterhas, who is nothing. And that actress is amazing! Like every Verhoeven film, it's very unpleasant: it's about surviving in a world populated by assholes, and that's his philosophy. Of all the recent American films that were set in Las Vegas, Showgirls was the only one that was real — take my word for it. I who have never set foot in the place!”

    The image of Rivette, creator of such modest, low-key works as La Belle noiseuse (1991) and La Bande des quatre (1988), enthralled by one of Verhoeven’s frenzied, mega-budgeted popcorn movies seems strange…until you realize the qualities shared by the people in their films. One step out of reality, wandering in a fog of wishes and ideals, they’re dismayed over the prospect of a life in banality. Rivette often deals in actors or painters or magicians or spirits for his characters; Verhoeven’s are the intolerant, aggressive bourgeoisie, often the products of caustic, unfriendly environments, people who know where the guns are hidden and how to use them, and rarely with a concern for consequence. Call it the cinema of impulse.

    After doing some intriguing work in his native Netherlands, Verhoeven proved his box office mojo in American action fare: Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and Basic Instinct (1992). He made a fortune, and was the best thing that ever happened to Sharon Stone. Total Recall benefits enormously from her haughty sensuality, as does Basic Instinct, Verhoeven’s first unabashed foray into glossy kitsch with an ice pick at its center. Both of her characters exemplify the adolescent male fear of independent, mature, beautiful women as vampires, using the promise of sex to drain the life from men who are, to the director’s understanding, innocent and hapless victims of circumstance.

    When casting was underway for Showgirls Sharon was approaching forty — some fifteen years (and a few pounds) beyond the film’s naïve, star-struck lap dancer Nomi Malone. The part went to statuesque wetdream Elizabeth Berkley, Sharon Stone Lite. All things considered, she does remarkably well in the role. (Up to that point, her biggest gig was the TV show Saved By the Bell.) Seemingly oblivious to such overripe dialogue as “You look better than a ten inch dick,” Berkley’s completely immersed in the vacuous persona, even poignant at times, often charging like a bull in a china shop to points beyond the Method. A total fantasy figure, her Nomi maintains a radiant complexion and a firm twenty-inch waist on a steady diet of cheese fries, potato chips and Big Macs — undoubtedly Eszterhas’s kind of woman.

Above: In any other film dealing with deceit and subterfuge, this image could stir up all manner of metaphysical ramification. In Showgirls, she’s simply putting on her makeup. (Click to enlarge.)

    There’s nothing inappropriate about the character as far as Verhoeven’s punch-drunk Vegas is concerned. Less a realist than a caricaturist, he milks the setting as a microcosm of consumerist decadence rotting from its own avarice and adrenaline. There’s no doubt that this was unintentional, since he’s admitted to approaching the script from a radically different perspective (in an interview supplied on the DVD, Verhoeven claims that it’s “a musical”), but Showgirls is littered with the sins of contemporary Sodom underlined by thumping Wagnerian techno pop.

    The media-fueled preoccupation with youth and appearance, gluttony and expensive toys, the loathing of middle-income people (characters here either own mansions or live in trailers)…greed, power, fleeting success, ego, vanity, manipulation, instant gratification…to say nothing of ferocious acrobatic sex that would land most of us in the hospital…these sundry elements permeate Eszterhas’s ludicrous scenario, which draws liberally from the well of 1940’s and 50’s backstage melodrama — specifically All About Eve (1950), this time with an exotic dancer gyrating her way up the ladder, stepping over the bodies in stiletto heels.

    It was slapped with an NC-17 rating for nudity and simulated sex in its cheesy stage shows and austere dance numbers. Berkley and Gina Gershon (playing the Bette Davis part) look fabulous in and out of their clothes, but the pounding repetition of bare, wrinkle-free skin punches lust and desire into numbness. Lacking the acumen for successful and stimulating erotica, Verhoeven manages to flatten their magnificent physiques into meat. Clenched facial expressions, hyperactivity and the arrogant sense of entitlement euphemistically called “attitude,” so fashionable in the 90’s and prevalent among the pinched and modish cast, sours the senses, causing physical beauty and the mere thought of sex to seem vulgar and redundant. (Not that it’s completely asexual: Berkley’s lap dance with Kyle MacLachlan and the lesbian tease sessions with Gershon do have their moments.)

    A case of the dragon consuming itself by the tail, Showgirls transcends the limitations normally set by genre and dramatic convention — and comes to embody every foul, odious thing it professes to abhor. That it evolves into a compelling (and very funny) reflection of western culture spiraling out of control for lack of dignity and shame was surely an accident. The picture was a box office bomb, killed by its MPAA rating and the reluctance of exhibitors to show it, causing Berkley’s film career to go south and sending Verhoeven back to the boot camp sci-fi of Starship Troopers. However, when Showgirls won a ‘Razzie’ award for worst picture, Verhoeven was on hand to collect the prize…even he thought it sucked. Perhaps too myopic to see, he may be unable to fathom it as an indictment of culture tainted by the very boorishness that made films like Total Recall and Basic Instinct hits.

Above: After it tanked in its initial run, United Artists tried hawking Showgirls as a so-bad-it’s-good attraction on the midnight show circuit, but no one was buying it.

Showgirls Trivia Contest: In a nightclub scene in the film, a DJ plays a 1990’s dance mix that borrows music from the soundtrack of what 1960’s movie? Send your answers here, with “Showgirls contest” in the subject box. Prizes will go to the first three correct responses. Prizes will be sent only to addresses in North America.

Furthermore…
Bloggers celebrating International Showgirls Day:
The Whine Colored Sea
Girish
Fagistan
Drifting
Obsolete Vernacular
Long Pauses
Hell on Frisco Bay
Elusive Lucidity
Cinephiliac
When Canses were Classeled
Supposed Aura
Nilblogette
Coffee, Coffee, and More Coffee
Cinematical
Video Watchblog
GreenCine Daily
Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule
Bitter Cinema
Self-Styled Siren

…and…
Official site
IMDb
Showgirls screen grabs
Gina Gershon gallery

Parsley, sage and Rosemary’s baby

Chauntal Lewis in The Commune

There’s been some buzz over The Commune (2009), Elisabeth Fies’s debut as writer-producer-director that’s just found its way to DVD. Marketing itself as “a new cult classic” before any cults have had time to form, the scenario follows a virgin teen girl from a broken home (newcomer Chauntal Lewis) shipped off to live with her nonconformist dad (Stuart G. Bennett) who’s running a hippiefied brainwashing outfit in the middle of the forest. Cell phones and contemporary tween culture clash with tofu, macramé and late-60s dogma, sending the girl spinning into the arms of a young, hamburger-swilling local named Puck (an amply eyelined David Lago). But this midsummer’s dream is soiled by dad’s all-too apparent lust for his little girl, and before you can say Rosemary’s Baby, she’s being prepped for an unholy union with the Horned God himself.
    Shot inexpensively, the film’s less polished moments often revolve around Adrian Lee’s odd turn as a Mother Earth figure. Whether espousing fortune cookie philosophy or extolling dad’s divine guidance, the actor’s awkward line readings could be interpreted as either the work of a hopeless amateur, or an inventive approach to unhinge an already unstable environment. To these eyes, she comes off like Poltergeist’s Zelda Rubenstein (“Cross over children! All are welcome!”) auditioning for Chelsea Girls.
    Looking uncomfortably similar to Firesign Theatre’s Peter Bergman, Bennett’s daffy dad tends to get a bit bug-eyed on his frequent trips over the top. But as her character suffers in pampered pain, Lewis is excellent — to say nothing of the uncanny resemblance to Lindsay Lohan. And Fies’s eye and ear for the patchouli-n-paisley netherworld of late-60s hedonism rings fairly true, while her incestuous spin on David Koresh — would you send your kids to live with him? — could use a little fleshing out.

Milla’s crossing

Approximately fifteen minutes into Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010), which was relentlessly hyped for its state of the art 3D, the technology flattens from age. A new 3D movie seems to come out every Friday, and this one sends decapitated heads, ninja stars, bullets and dropkicks into the eye at a blinding speed. But with all the labor going into the action itself, we never register the emotions that would cause the characters to chop, slice, mutilate and shoot one another. In fact, for something striving to be so hip, it quickly regresses to such retro eye candy gimmicks as slo-mo, midair freeze frames and other Matrix-era clichés.

    Stemming from a videogame, this, the fourth in a live action series, follows Resident Evil (2002), Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), and Resident Evil: Extinction (2007), which were all written by Paul W.S. Anderson. He directed the first and this latest installment, both lacking the fun and energy of Apocalypse (directed by Alexander Witt) and Extinction (Russell Mulcahy). I got into the series via Blu-ray, and wonder if my disenchantment over the new one stems from the theatrical experience itself. Could these bubblegum epics be properly viewed only at home, in those precise moments when their frantic mindlessness is the best tonic for whatever ails?

    Milla Jovovich is back as ‘Project Alice,’ who we last saw floating among hundreds of embryonic clones gearing up to do battle with the Umbrella Corporation, evildoers supreme. For the record, I think Extinction is the best in the series, and its ending suggested a sequel with a lot more meat than Afterlife has shaking on its half-gnawed bones. There are inconsistencies and gaffes (Alice is stripped of her superpowers but regains them without explanation); a paltry, token nod to the flesh-eating zombies; a hollow, faceless villain; none of the previous films’ sense of mystery or dread; and way, way too much slo-mo. When the picture ends so abruptly, it’s the only thing we don’t expect.

    Jovovich is committed (she and Anderson are married), and often the sole focal point in a picture weathering rigor mortis. For better Milla, check her out in .45 (2006).

Our wicked, wicked ways

Claude Chabrol

June 24, 1930—September 12, 2010

I’d like to thank those of you who emailed me as soon as you heard about Claude Chabrol’s death. My interest and occasional obsessions with Chabrol’s work were an active passion for more than two decades, especially after I’d finally seen some of his lesser-known work on videocassette. Prior to that point in the 1980s, and outside of the major cities, his films were rarely shown in North America.
    There will be obituaries, reminiscences and critiques, by writers who will bestow him grace and intelligence. For he once was a respected contributor to Cahiers du Cinéma and a founding father of the nouvelle vague with Godard, Rohmer, Rivette and Truffaut, a position he essentially sacrificed for commercial gain. Then there were the wives: the first rich enough to foot the bill on his earliest pictures; the second, actress (and frequent star in the ‘60s and ‘70s) Stéphane Audran; the third, his widow Aurore, who’d been working on the set side by side with him and several of their children since the 1970s. From what I’ve read, he was close with his family and friends, and photographs show us a curious, academic, densely spectacled face about to light up over a private, and probably dirty, joke.
    I was first drawn to him when I was twelve- or thirteen-years-old, rifling through copies of John Willis’s annual Screen World in the public library. One volume offered a terrifying scene, of a gaunt, Frankenstein-like man in a fit of rage, holding a scared little boy over his head. The caption read, “Jean Yanne in Claude Chabrol’s The Butcher.” At the time I didn’t know this was a gaffe on Willis’s end (the man in the shot was Jean-Claude Drouot in Chabrol’s Rupture), but the very name ‘Chabrol’ had an odd feel, velvety, like a soft binding on a rare volume of secrets.
    Somewhere along the way, the press likened him to Hitchcock, and he was soon labeled ‘The French Alfred Hitchcock’ — mostly out of convenience or ignorance by anyone satisfied to receive his pictures as murder mysteries or thrillers. This must’ve delighted Chabrol, for it probably made financing his projects easier. He’d worked with most of the major French stars since the late 1950s (although, off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything he made with Catherine Deneuve), and several Americans, the latter often in obscure Canadian and European co-productions that were harder to see than his French pictures.
    And the films? Where do I begin? My admiration makes objectivity nearly impossible, years of picking out obscure symbols, half-glance metaphors, unseen needles resting on top of imposing haystacks. My interest has never been academic — others infinitely smarter than myself can provide you with coherent analyses of Chabrol’s repeated use of small cars speeding down dark roads; of sexual triangles soured by obsessive-compulsive romantics and control freaks; the famous use of food and dining for color and tension; the significance of the Hélène cycle; the odd lighting and set design, too often cheerless and overexposed; the awareness of power in family and the threat of nepotism; the freewheeling abandonment of genre forms; and his relentless interest in the fundamentals that sparked the French Revolution.
    I once felt he rivaled Buñuel on that last count, as a knowledgeable observer of class mores and ethics. Unlike Buñuel, Chabrol is less caustic and more sympathetic to the working class, sensitive to the words that go unsaid in otherwise heated discussion; and the hidden ramifications of class rule on an individual’s manner and thinking. I was (and still am) a fervent supporter of La cérémonie (1995), a masterpiece on class conflict and oppression where Chabrol’s meticulous eye for choreographed body language (circulating among a dream cast of Sandrine Bonnaire, Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Pierre Cassel and Jacqueline Bisset) shows us that the dropping of a handkerchief could easily set off a full-scale war.
    You shouldn’t read about these films before seeing them. Going into a Chabrol, expectations can shortchange the nuance. These are works about attitudes and behavior, from an artist balancing decency with corruption. If I were asked to recommend any specific titles from what’s available on DVD, La cérémonie, À double tour (1959), Les Bonnes femmes (1960), Les Biches (1968), La Femme infidèle (1969), and Le Boucher (1970) would be good places to start. For advanced studies, however, watch and re-watch his segment “La Muette” in Paris vu par (1965); the miraculous La Route de Corinthe (1967); the Oedipal quagmire of Ten Days’ Wonder (1971); Nada (1974), a political treatise on terrorism that out-Z’s Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969); Une partie de plaisir (1975), an acidic dedication, of sorts, to Chabrol’s screenwriting collaborator and longtime friend, Paul Gégauff; the wondrous Poulet au vinaigre (1985), the director’s witty answer to American TV detective shows; and especially Merci pour le chocolat (2000) and La fleur du mal (2003), where forked tongues wag in worlds of ulterior motives.
    Now that he’s no longer making movies, the individual titles may begin to blur and the oeuvre may take shape as a vast singular entity, with as many crevices, nooks and hiding places as the human mind itself. I thank him for what he gave us, and look forward to revisiting his work over the coming decades. He was a sly fox.

The Claude Chabrol Project is my dedication site that desperately needs updating.

In June, 2009, I hosted The Claude Chabrol Blogathon — plenty of links for you to visit.

There's no simple explanation

The Tragically Hip’s “Courage” performed by Sarah Polley in The Sweet Hereafter