Periodically, I need a reminder that my knowledge about films is parochial and circumscribed by availability and other arbitrary factors. I had never heard of Eliseo Subiela's 1986 picture, Man Facing Southeast, even though, apparently, the movie is well-known in many circles and much-acclaimed. Indeed, the director in an interview provided among the extras on the DVD that I watched (Kino Lorbeer) described the movie as a "mega-hit" and the film that established his reputation. Of course, since I have also never heard of Eliseo Subiela, the latter comment is also moot. Made in Argentina, about two years after the collapse of the nation's vicious military dictatorship, the film wasn't even shown in Subiela's home country -- there was little interest in the movie that was set in a notorious insane asylum and the actors in the picture were recruited from the Argentina theater (Shakespearian actors by and large) and not known from TV or movies in that country. It seems that the picture was a big hit at the Montreal Film Festival and, later, gathered a following at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas. Now, the movie is said to have a "cult" status and has been remade or pirated in K-Pax (2001) and Mr. Jones (1993). (The director of K-Pax claimed that he had no knowledge of the film when similarities between his movie and Man Facing Southeast were noted -- as of 2001, Man Facing Southeast was said to be a "little-known Argentinan film".) In fact, Subiela's movie is ingenious and very compelling; it fully deserves cult status although, it should be said, that the picture has some deficiencies characteristic of "cult" movies -- it's very cheaply made and somewhat elliptical primarily due to budgetary issues. And there's too much reliance on voice-over narration by the hero. But the acting is very good and Subiela is a highly sophisticated moviemaker -- the film is intensely poetic although in a curiously understated and unobtrusive way.
Dr. Denis is a staff psychiatrist at a large, intimidating insane asylum in some unnamed big city. A feature of mental illness is that the victim of such pathology seems "stuck" -- that is, unable to progress beyond certain fixed ideas. This is demonstrated in the initial scene in which Denis interviews a madman who has killed his lover in an unsuccessful suicide pact -- she shot herself and the patient also fired two bullets into his brain but somehow survived. The poor insane patient repeats himself over and over. Denis' mind wanders -- he flashes onto a famous Magritte painting of two figures with their faces wrapped in cloth trying to kiss; in his vision, blood seeps through the cloth. Like the madman, Denis is stuck himself, a burnt-out case, who despairs of saving, or even helping anyone in the huge asylum. We learn that Denis is divorced, the father of two children that he sees only intermittently, and, probably, an alcoholic. He plays saxophone alone in his apartment to amuse himself and morosely watches home movies showing his family in happier days when he was still married.
A nurse tells Denis that "the count is wrong" in one of the wards that he supervises. It's not an escape but an additional patient, one too many. Denis is told by an old man who seems to be bed-ridden that the new patient comes from far away "but is a very good man." The new patient, named Rantes, is discovered playing a Bach fugue on the church organ at the asylum -- a group of enraptured patients surround him. Rantes, a handsome young man who looks very much like Lou Reed when he was in his thirties, tells Denis that the music is only vibrations in the air and, therefore, he can't understand how it has an emotional effect on those listening. Later, Rantes says that he is a hologram, a projection of some sort, sent from a somewhere in outer space to transmit data about human beings to his home planet. Of course, Denis thinks the man is insane but, nonetheless, is interested by his case and, even, finds new purpose as a result of his interactions with the purported alien. Rantes stands in the rather neglected and shabby courtyard of the huge asylum facing southeast -- he says that he is transmitting and receiving data from outer space. Rantes is appalled by the cruelty and suffering on earth and can't understand why such things happen. He is kind to everyone and expresses Christian values of gentleness and universal love to the extent that Denis calls him a "cybernetic Christ." Rantes says that every day earthlings murder "god within them" and that he, together with other aliens, most of them also incarcerated in madhouses, are mounting a rescue mission. Rantes has telekinetic powers and moves things around to facilitate escapes from the insane asylum. In one scene, he slides dishes full of food across a restaurant counter to provide nourishment for a starving mother and her two children -- when the owner of the cafe discovers the woman and her child eating from other people's plates of food, Rantes causes a stack of glasses to topple to the floor to cover her escape. Rantes is visited by a woman named Beatriz Dick -- she is sometimes called the Saint in the movie. She tells Denis that she works with Rantes in the slums of the City where he has a reputation of being a living and accessible Christ figure. (By this point, Rantes is spending a lot of time outside the asylum with the collusion of the psychiatrist.) Beatriz and Dr. Denis, who are now attracted to one another, go with Rantes to a symphony concert -- it's an open air affair in a city park. The conductor is directing the orchestra in the famous Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Inspired, Rantes gets us and dances with Beatriz triggering hundreds of other couples to dance with them. Then, he mounts the podium and conducts the "Turkish music" from the Ninth Symphony's last movement. Somehow, the inmates intuit the music and begin to bang pots in time to the Turkish march; there's an uprising in the madhouse in which the patients storm about the halls. Police have to be called to quell the rebellion. Meanwhile at the concert, everyone is dancing wildly. The next day, the newspaper reports that a madman directed the symphony orchestra. The director of the asylum meets with Denis and reprimands him severely (for what we would call "boundary violations"); the director, who means well, orders Denis to "cure" Rantes. This leads to sedative injections and shock therapy. Rantes' ability to receive and broadcast "factual transmissions" is disrupted and he no longer faces Southeast in the courtyard. There is a fight about the quality of the food served in the asylum -- Rantes demands that the director eat the same food as the patients. This leads to harsher treatment. Ultimately, it's reported that Rantes is dying. Denis invites Beatriz, the Saint, to his apartment where they have sex. She gushes some kind of blue frothy foam from her lips at orgasm. (Rantes has previously told him about this phenomenon.) Beatriz tells Denis that she is an alien herself and one of the agents trying to rescue mankind from itself. Denis is inexplicably outrated and berates her as a lunatic, kicking her out of his apartment. After she has left, he looks in her left-behind purse and finds a picture of her standing next to Rantes beaming at the camera -- the picture seems to have been taken ten or so years earlier and has been torn to eliminate one or more other figures. Rantes takes his children fishing; on that day in February 1985, Rantes dies. The patients at the asylum mourn his death and stand in a great ring in the courtyard, waiting for a flying saucer to come to bear the alien away.
The movie's central crux is whether Rantes is just a madman or, really, some sort of space savior sent to earth to reform human institutions. Rantes has said that there are many others like him on earth, but this can't be verified and, of course, Beatriz's status is ambiguous. The director, Subiela says that he doesn't know if Rantes is merely a mentally ill person or a true "man who fell to earth" space alien. (Of course, insane people, no matter how clever and talented, don't have telekinetic properties and, therefore, the objective evidence in the movie suggests that Rantes is, indeed, likely a man from outer space; similarly, Beatriz' trick of squirting blue fluid from her lips at orgasm doesn't seem exactly earthly.) This is sort of a cheat and, I think, the picture would be better without the telekinesis (and blue froth), unnecessary elements in any event. Dr. Denis understands that the message of the Gospel must always be suppressed and to follow in Jesus' footsteps, of course, is to invite crucifixion. Indeed, Denis understands that in the world of the vast insane asylum, he is one of the oppressors and equates himself to Pontius Pilate. (He is more skeptical of the enterprise than his boss who admits that almost no one is cured but that if a single insane person's condition improves, then, the asylum and its discipline can be justified.)
Man facing Southeast is poetic, even lyrical, although the film's lyricism is understated. Dreamlike elements of the plot, the story's poetic features, are very restrained. In this respect, the movie resembles mature Bunuel, obviously an influence on the moviemaker -- the film's eccentric or surrealistic details are in small details. We see the Saint's purse falling in slow-motion after Denis has searched it and found the strange photograph of Beatriz with Rantes. In several scenes, Beatriz inexplicably withdraws into isolation and changes her shoes. In his bachelor apartment, corners of rooms are full of draped furniture, ghost-like swaddled forms that recall the lovers trying to kiss although their heads are wrapped in burlap in the Magritte painting. The asylum has a very real and palpable presence. The scene in the choir loft with Rantes playing Bach involving a crane shot is particularly noteworthy for the details of stairway, cement block walls, and austere modernist stained glass revealed in that location. Subiela's first film, made when he was 18, was a documentary about the Borda Mental Hospital and, in the interview, the director says he was always afraid of the place -- but, nonetheless, the movie was made in that location with madmen standing all around the actors as scenes were shot. "Schizophrenia," Subielo says, "has a very distinct odor." In a late scene, as Rantes is dying, Subielo keeps the camera far away from his subject. We see an empty refectory, some pewter on one side of the room, and the two men huddled in the corner as Denis interrogates Rantes who is unable, it seems to speak. The dialogue is often philosophical, concerned with ethical issues about justice and human dignity. When the director of the asylum castigates Denis about the concert, he says what if you had gone to a "military parade, would the newspaper report 'A madman orders a military attack." "But this has already happened," Denis replies, referring, I think, to the Falklands War. At the end of the film, Denis speculates as to whether Beatriz and Rantes were lovers or siblings -- "Perhaps," he thinks, "the idiot children of a mad alcoholic father, they are unable to forget." In the context of the military Junta and its "dirty war" in which 30,000 people just disappeared without a trace, this is a poignant and profound surmise. This is a picture that embeds itself in your imagination.
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