In this installment: (11) Black Book, (12) Blow Up, (13) Blue Velvet, (14) Body Double, and (15) The Bride Wore Black.
11. Black Book (2006, "Zwartboek")
Paul Verhoeven with Carice van Houten and Sebastian Koch.
A movie that shows how difficult it is to distinguish truth from reality in times of war. We like to divide humanity into "heroes" and "traitors", especially after the fact, but reality is not so black and white. Realities shift all the time, and the "good guys" suddenly turn out to be traitors - and vice versa. People's actions and intentions shift and become ambiguous all the time. That is also the theme of one of the greatest Dutch novels of the 20th century, The Dark Room of Damocles by W.F. Hermans.
Black Book tells the story of Rachel (played brilliantly by Carice van Houten), a young Jewish woman in the final years of the war. It is an epic thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat the entire time - and goes much deeper than that. Rachel's parents are killed while trying to escape to Belgium, she joins the resistance movement under the new name Ellis de Vries, gets the order to befriend a German officer (played by Sebastian Koch), falls in love with him...
This short summary already shows where this movie is different. Instead of the usual stark black and white (the Nazis as inhuman beasts, the Dutch as nothing but exemplary heroes, as in Verhoeven's older Soldier of Orange), this movie paints reality as it is, in various shades of gray. There are "good" Germans, just as there are "wrong" people in the resistance.
Another theme of the movie is that war does not end when an official armistice is declared. For Rachel and her friends, the war continues even as crowds dance in victory in the streets, and indeed war seems to be the perversely "normal" human condition (we see them at the end on a kibbutz in Israel, where gunfire can be heard).
Straitlaced critics have denounced Black Book as sleazy: they object, for example, to the prison scene in which Rachel is smothered in a bucket of human shit by her own guards. But what could be more topical, given recent history? Moreover, Carice van Houten is a great Verhoeven heroine, in the tradition of Sharon Stone and Elizabeth Berkley.
This movie raises moral complexities that blockbusters don't often confront, such as the amorality of wartime events, how war criminals often escape justice, and how its heroes are often not the good guys.
12. Blow Up (1966)
Michelangelo Antonioni with David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave and Sarah Miles. Based on a short story by Julio Cortázar.
A movie that shows us that we cannot trust our senses. A photographer thinks he has seen something fascinating through his camera, but when he enlarges the image, it turns out to be tragic. Or is it?
Set in the swinging (but now very remote) London of the 1960s, the protagonist of this movie is a popular fashion photographer, Thomas, who lives an empty life of "sex, drugs and rock and roll". Bored with all the gratuitous sex, mindless models, groupies and lazy pot parties, he goes through the motions of his work soullessly. He would like to branch out into other types of photography, but that will not bring in the money he is making now. He happens to take pictures of a couple in the park, a woman and an older man; the woman remonstrates with him and follows him to his studio. She even takes off her blouse to seduce him and steal the movie. Thomas sends her away with the wrong part, but is fascinated by this woman, so different from the superficial girls around him.
Then, out of curiosity, Thomas enlarges the photos and in a beautiful sequence, hanging larger and larger prints on his wall, discovers that he has photographed a murder - in the grainy image he sees a man with a gun hiding in the bushes behind the couple, and the older man who was with the woman later lies prostrate on the grass. Thomas returns to the park, now at night. The mystery deepens and at the same time proves to be unsolvable, since the mysterious woman has also disappeared... but for a short time, the mystery has awakened him from his lethargy.
Antonioni filmed in a great style, with little dialog, almost telling the whole movie with the camera. At the time, Blow-Up was notorious for an orgy scene with groupies; today this is tame, but what shocks is the protagonist's cruelty and contempt for women, as shown in the way he treats his models and girlfriends, an aspect of the 60s that we seem to have forgotten.
The film
ends with a nice symbolic scene where a group of students with white
faces mimic playing tennis in the park – Thomas pretends he can see the
ball and we hear it on the soundtrack, but it isn't there, just like the
core mystery of the film.
[Based on my blog article about Classical Novels and Film Part 2]
13. Blue Velvet (1986)
David Lynch with Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan and Dennis Hopper.
The movie begins with images that suggest we are in an idyllic, quiet American town (Lumberton), but soon the viewer gets the unsettling feeling that this same town will be the setting for a dark scene. Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) finds a human ear in the middle of a lawn near his home. Jeffrey feels the urge to find out where this ear came from and sets out to investigate. He takes the ear to police detective Williams, whose daughter Sandy (Laura Dern) leads Jeffrey to nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini).
Jeffrey rings Vallens' doorbell, poses as an exterminator, and manages to steal her key. With the same determination as James Stewart in Rear Window, Jeffrey turns into a voyeur before the viewer's eyes: he returns to Vallens' apartment at night and hides in a closet. But it does not take long for the singer to discover the intruder, and suddenly the roles are reversed. At this moment, however, a scene follows that is as unpleasant for the viewer as it is for Jeffrey.
Dorothy receives an unexpected visit from Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), a sadistic and foul-mouthed psychopath with bizarre sexual tendencies, who humiliates her. Jeffrey, once again hiding in the closet, watches helplessly and gradually discovers that Frank has a pathological obsession with Dorothy and has also kidnapped her husband and child. Hopper plays one of the most terrifying criminals in movie history.
Both the viewer and Jeffrey are drawn into a nightmare that makes them wonder how it is possible that cruel figures like Frank have a place on this planet. What David Lynch wants to make clear with this movie: "Nothing is as it seems, everything is an illusion." When the movie returns to the idyll in the final shots, we don't believe it anymore.
Also note the symbolism in the movie, such as the insect motif.
14. Body Double (1984)
Brian De Palma with Craig Wasson, Gregg Henry, Melanie Griffith and Deborah Shelton.
A cult film about obsession and voyeurism, it is also a conscious play on Hitchcockian conventions and an ode to the great master's famous films (such as Vertigo, Rear Window and Dial M for Murder).
Body Double follows the claustrophobic Jake Scully (B-actor Craig Wasson), a vampire movie actor who has just suffered the double disaster of being fired and finding his girlfriend in bed with another man. Scully needs a place to stay (the apartment belonged to his girlfriend) and gratefully accepts the chance to house-sit at a spectacular place in the Hollywood Hills (actually the Chemosphere on Torreyson Drive, just off Mullholland Drive, in Los Angeles). The owner is away in Europe, and the current house-sitter, fellow actor Sam Bouchard (Gregg Henry), has to leave town for a few weeks. Sam shows Scully the bonus of this place: through a telescope on the balcony you can see into the open window of a bedroom where the gorgeous neighbor Gloria Revelle (1970 Miss America Deborah Shelton) performs nightly stripteases (or so it seems).
Scully is so excited about what he has seen through the telescope that the next day he follows the woman in his car to a shopping mall and then to the beach. But Scully soon realizes that he is not the only stalker... she is also being followed by a mysterious Indian with a disfigured face.
In fact, the next night, through his telescope, he sees the Indian murder the woman with a power drill and arrives too late to save her. Scully is plunged into the chaos of a bizarre murder mystery and seeks help from dancer Holly Body (Melanie Griffith), who seems to hold the key to finding the killer (Scully has noticed that she uses the same dance routine as the victim)...
Here are some examples of how De Palma pays homage to Hitchcock:
- At the beginning of the movie, Jake Scully is overcome by claustrophobia while filming a scene in a coffin (and this claustrophobia will return later at crucial moments), just as Jimmy Stewart suffered from vertigo in Vertigo.
- The spying scenes with the telescope are reminiscent of Rear Window.
- Instead of Stewart stalking Kim Novak, here Scully stalks Deborah Shelton in a shopping mall.
- Instead of Hitchcock's camera circling Novak and Stewart, De Palma's camera waltzes around Scully and Shelton as they embrace on the beach.
- Melanie Griffith (who gives one of her best performances in this movie) is the daughter of Tippi Hedren, who starred in Hitchcock's Birds and Marnie. Her hairstyle is the "platinum blonde" favored by Hitchcock.
De Palma's camera movements are beautiful, such as a twenty-minute, dialogue-free chase sequence, and he uses iconic Los Angeles locations. This is a great movie, but also a rather sleazy one, so the critical opinion was against De Palma when the movie came out. But Roger Ebert praised the film, giving it three and a half out of four stars. In fact, the movie developed a dedicated cult following and is still going strong today - which is right, because it really is full of tongue-in-cheek humor.
[Based on my previous blog article]
15. The Bride Wore Black (1968, La Mariée était en noir)
François Truffaut with Jeanne Moreau. Based on the novel of the same name by Cornell Woolrich.
Julie, the bride of the title, is widowed on her wedding day when her brand-new husband is shot from a window. The young widow vows to avenge her husband's murder and manages to track down the five men involved. She decides to kill them one by one. Adopting a series of disguises, Moreau insinuates herself into the lives of all five culprits. Using her charms, she enslaves them and then stages their deaths. With the first three, she succeeds easily. But the fourth, a car salesman, is arrested for fraud before her eyes and taken to prison. The fifth, Fergus, is an artist who paints a portrait of her. After Fergus is murdered, she is arrested at his funeral and confesses to the four murders. In prison, she gets a job in the kitchen and looks for the opportunity to kill her last victim. The ominous score was written by Bernard Herrmann, a frequent Hitchcock collaborator.
Truffaut modified Woolrich's novel according to Hitchcockian principles: in the book, Julie's motive is not revealed until the end, and the mystery remains; in the movie, a flashback after the second murder reveals the motive, and the mystery becomes suspenseful.
The ending of the movie is also very different from that of the novel: in William Irish's work, the heroine discovers that she has killed innocent people.
The influence of this film on the screenplay of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill films is obvious, even if the director denies it.
100 Greatest Films