Three Businessmen

What happened to Alex Cox?  Cox directed two landmark picture in the early 80's, Repo Man and Sid and Nancy.  Repo Man was callow, vicious, and brilliant.  Sid and Nancy was squalid but eerily romantic, a signature work of its time.  Then, Cox seemed to fizzle out -- his Walker, an indictment of American policy in central American, was an epic failure with both audiences and critics.  His parody spaghetti Western, starring just about every hipster in Hollywood, seemed an in-joke, Beat the Devil for the late eighties.  Then, Cox seems to have vanished.  This is an illusion -- Cox, who is British, continued making films on smaller and smaller budgets; no one in the United States saw the movies because they weren't distributed here and, so, it seemed that one of the world's most innovative directors was simply MIA.  (The same thing happened for about two decades with Robert Altman -- no one wrote about his films and, if they were released, no one saw them; but, of course, he was working the whole time.)  Cox apparently had shows on British TV, wrote a column for Sight and Sound about spaghetti Westerns ("A Thousand Ways to Die") and, of course, made movies that were never screened, as far as I know, in the United States.  One of these films is 1999's Three Businessmen.  It's a slight film, produced on a tiny budget, and mostly a "shaggy dog" story -- that is, intentionally overlong for its subject and avowedly pointless.  Here is where Cox runs into trouble, I suppose, with general audiences:  I can't recommend the movie because it's not really worth the effort to locate and view -- on the other hand, it's an estimable little film, with an interesting twist at the end and, I would argue, a work that should fascinate cinephiles.  For the rest of the world, the movie was marketed primarily on Debbie Harry's version of the old cowboy classic "Ghost Riders in the Sky" that plays over the closing titles -- if you're a fan of that song (and who isn't?) the DVD can be had for about five dollars including shipping and I recommend you pick it up.

An American art-dealer (specializing in work of the Southwest) appears in a grim, dreary Liverpool.  The art-dealer is played by Miguel Sandoval, the only instantly recognizable face in the film.  He has two huge roller bags that he drags through the cold, grey city streets.  (At last, he capitulates, hires a cab, which drives him about 150 feet to the door of the hotel he has been hiking to.)  The hotel is like an urban version of Kubrick's Overlook in The Shining-- it's opulent, but no one seems around and the doors of the rooms are all missing numbers or hidden in the darkness so that Sandoval's character (Benny Reyes) has to use his cell-phone to illumine them.  Benny sits around his eerie room -- there are knocks on the door with no one present -- and, then, goes to the dining room.  He's seated along side a British art dealer and Liverpudlian, Frank King, played by Alex Cox himself.  There's no smell of food in the dining room -- "not surprising in an English restaurant," King says blandly -- and when the two men go to the kitchen, it's totally abandoned.  No one is present in the hotel at all and so the two men go out onto Matthew Street, looking for a place to eat.  They look at the Cave Club where the Beatles performed and, then, see a statue bust of Carl Jung in a niche overlooking the sidewalk.  What is this doing here?  The men wander around the night streets of the city bickering and looking for some place to eat, an objective complicated by the fact that Frank is a vegetarian.  At every turn, they are thwarted --either the restaurant closes as they enter or the waiters won't serve them for inscrutable reasons.  They are able to buy drinks but don't really get drunk.  At some point, the attentive viewer will grasp that the two men are no longer in Liverpool at all -- in fact, their midnight peregrinations take them to Rotterdam, where Benny has a panic-attack when they are finally presented with an opulent table of food, Hong Kong and Tokyo.  The two businessmen believe that they are still in Liverpool and, of course, why wouldn't they make this mistake? -- but it gradually dawns on the viewer that, for instance, the ferry across the Mersey River is, instead, a ferry crossing Hong Kong harbor.  At one point, they find a Japanese garden and orient themselves on their Liverpool map where that garden is marked -- but, by this time, it's obvious to the viewers that they are, in fact, in Japan. The men's wandering takes place in a wasteland of shuttered commercial districts, international restaurants (an Indian place or a Thai restaurant or Irish pub is pretty much the same all over the world) -- they take subways and els and ferries, passing through ghostly landscapes where the escalators are never working with desolate skyways and pedestrian bridges that lead nowhere.  Throughout this all, the men keep up a steady banter -- it's all pretty trivial and banal:  Benny is an optimist, an American with a "can-do" attitude; Frank is a pessimist who despairs at the state of the world.  In the end, the two men take a cab from a Japanese restaurant, where they have been denied a meal by an enigmatic and extremely polite chef.  The cab deposits them in the desert and, at this point, it's clear to everyone (except the two hapless heroes) that we aren't in Liverpool any more.  Joined by a third businessman, Leroy, a Black man from Chicago who is bearing a gift for his child, the men hitch a mule-cart into a desolate little adobe village.  (Throughout their trek, all walls have been plastered with a poster for a musician named DaddyZ -- I didn't understand the significance of these posters, which are ubiquitous, until I listened to the commentary.)  The men finally get a meal, apparently refried beans with some meat, and there is a final, very short, encounter.  After the encounter, the men see that they are on Matthew Street, although the street sign is on a half-block of adobe buildings in the sun-baked desert village; the black man says that he sees a sign for Lakeshore Boulevard and so he believes he's back in Chicago.  The proprietor of the tiny café where the men have eaten goes out to pull down the signs advertising Daddy Z on the adobe walls and Debbie Harry's voice sings "Ghost Riders in the Sky."  The movie seems to be about 70 minutes long and is a Bunuel pastiche -- in The Discrete  Charm of the Bourgeoisie, a group of oligarchs (who turn out to be drug smugglers) keep trying to meet for a dinner party that is always deferred by absurd, surrealistic accidents.  (Cox's production company is Exterminating Angel, referring to another Bunuel film and the strange trek across a terrain that becomes increasingly disordered is similar to the Spanish director's work in The Milky Way -- in fact, a theological subtext in Cox's film is similar to the debates about various heresies that occur during the pilgrimage to Santiago Campostela shown in The Milky Way.) The final twist is clever, and surprising:  it turns on the notion that each of the men is a king at least by name. -- Frankie King, Bennie Reyes, and Leroy.  I don't know what the ending is supposed to mean but it's thought-provoking.

The film documents a classic anxiety dream.  It's obsolete today because everyone has Google Maps on their phone and the ap "Near Me" as well to help find pubs and open restaurants in the circumambient area.  Such things were apparently unknown in 1999.   The banter between the two men is not particularly interesting and highly stereotyped -- indeed, I don't think it's particularly well-written and, generally, seems implausible.  Furthermore, Sandoval and Cox are not very good actors -- Sandoval is all phony bonhomie and not at all convincing (I'm used to him playing a more melancholy character and he seems miscast as a cock-eyed American optimist).  Cox is pretty terrible -- he's an odd-looking duck, sort of Mad magazine's Alfred E. Neuman on stilts and he doesn't give his lines convincing readings; in fact, he's the worst thing in the movie).  The camera-work features long takes that are sometimes a tiny bit wobbly -- the camerawork is not flawless but it is pretty good. There's something contrived and amateurish about the film, but, on the other hand, I thought it was interesting from beginning to end.