Dead Calm

 1200 miles from land, on a sleek yacht, Nicole Kidman (Rae) battles a psycho-killer.  Fifty miles away in fierce squall violent with lightning, Rae's husband, John fights to survive as the larger schooner on which he is trapped begins to sink.  People get shot with spear-guns, mangled by boat propellers, threatened with a shotgun, and shot in the face by emergency flares.  A cute little dog named Benjy who lives on the yacht, is murdered.  Boats burn and rescue rafts are set afire and lightning snaps a mast dropping the massive wood pillar into the guts of the sinking schooner where John (Sam Elliot) is trapped.  When John has to breathe through a metal pipe, the outlet of the tube swarms with cockroaches.  George Miller, who made the Mad Max pictures, produced this movie and directed second-unit sequences.  Dead Calm, is the name of this 1989 Australian picture and, as you can imagine, the movie is anything but calm.

In some ways, Dead Calm (directed by Phillip Noyce) resembles Scorsese's Cape Fear -- there's an isolated boat, a woman in peril, and a psychotic villain who can't be killed.  No matter how badly mutilated, these sorts of psycho-killers keep reviving to continue their brutal crusade to rape and murder the heroine. Robert De Niro's scary monster in Cape Fear is, at least, motivated by revenge (he's trying to torture the wife of the prosecutor who put him in jail); by contrast, the psychopath in Dead Calm is just a ferocious madman, an example of more or less "motiveless malignity."

Based on a well-known 1963 novel by an American author Charles Williams, Dead Calm begins with a completely irrelevant prologue before getting to thriller business out on the high seas.  Rae and John have embarked on a sailing trip to the Great Barrier Reef (the Whitsunday Passage) to salve the young woman's psychic injuries incurred when she was involved in a terrible car crash in which her toddler son was killed.  Rae seems to be rallying when the couple, idling like a painted ship on a painted sea on a yacht called the Saracen sight a schooner adrift and obviously weather-battered.  A young man appears in a dinghy seemingly fleeing the "black schooner" as it is called -- he claims to be the sole survivor of a botulism outbreak on the vessel; it has, he claims, killed the other five people on board.  The young man seems weirdly manic and his story doesn't make sense.  John locks him in a stateroom on the Saracen and, then, rows over to the black schooner where he will spend almost all of the rest of the movie.  It turns out that the young man, Hughie (Billy Zane) has apparently butchered the other people on the vessel.  From clues discovered on the eerie ghost ship -- it's got naked carytid figureheads below deck and other sinister furnishings, strange messages scribbled in blood, and pale mangled corpses floating in the bilgewater -- John figures out that Hughie and an older man, a war correspondent, have recruited four beautiful models ("broad-minded" according to am\n advert on the boat) for a sex-cruise around the South Pacific.  But something has gone badly wrong and Hughie murders everyone on board, making a sort of "snuff film" that John views before things go badly wrong on the vessel.  There's a squall and the boat begins to sink and a mast knocked down by lightning traps John below deck.  Back on the Saracen, Hughie menaces Rae. She has sex with him to calm him down and, then, sets to work figuring out ways to disable him.  She poisons him with soporifics in his lemonade and this knocks him out, after some scary scenes in which he chases her around with a shotgun.  Having disabled Hughie, Rae doesn't kill him or throw him overboard -- this would be the logical way to deal with this mad dog.  Instead, she ties him up and locks him in a room with the predictable outcome that he escapes and chases her around  again, this time in the storm, for about a twenty minutes.  She finally kills him, but this is the sort of insane bad guy who has to be killed, at least, three times before he stays in the grave and so more mayhem ensues, all while Rae is sailing the Saracen through heavy seas to reach and rescue John on the sinking schooner.  (She has, as they say, her "hands full.")  

The movie is pretty good and has some nice Hitchcock touches.  Billy Zane is creepy as the ebullient sadist.  It's not entirely clear that Rae doesn't enjoy her sexual interlude with him.  The little dog is a good actor as is Sam Elliot as the stoic, unlucky husband, a naval officer which explains his seamanship with, nonetheless, goes awry.  There's no deeper meaning to the movie.  It's a simple straight-ahead suspense film with horror movie overtones.  The opening sequence, presumably motivated by fidelity to the novel, features a  horrific car crash and some nasty hospital scenes in which John has to tell Rae that their little son has been killed.  This scenes have nothing to do with the rest of the movie and lead nowhere and I don't understand why they were shot, let alone retained in the movie, except as filler.  The subject matter is rather thin and, therefore, it seems that the movie had to be padded.  At one point, the psycho-killer says that Rae has beautiful bone structure "behind her face" and that when she's eighty she will still be unavoidably beautiful;  Nicole Kidman was 22 when this movie was released.  She's starring on Amazon's limited series Expats in January of 2024 as I write and the madman's observations about her in Dead Calm remain pertinent and true.  

Society of the Snow

 J. A. Bayona's Society of the Snow is a two-hour twenty minute film, shot documentary-style, about an airplane crash in the Andes in 1972.  The victims of the crash, mostly young men who were team members of a Uruguayan rugby club, were trapped on a glacier for about two months and had to resort to cannibalism to survive.  This is harrowing subject matter and the film is something of a slog.  Edgar Alan Poe, in prefatory remarks to his short story "The Premature Burial", observed that there were certain historical events in which interest is "all-absorbing" but that are too horrible to be represented in literary fiction -- his examples include the earthquake in Lisbon, the passage of the Berezina, the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre and the stifling of the prisoners in Calcutta's Black Hole.  I suppose it would be valid to include the story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in this list.  The movie is very good, tactful and restrained given its subject, but most of the characters in the show die, and die horribly, and so you have been forewarned.  

The movie is nothing if not business-like.  A couple of chaotic close-up shots on a rugby field  in Uruguay establish the situation and, then, we see the characters planning a holiday in Santiago -- they have apparently chartered a plane to fly them over the Andes to Chile.  There's some cheerful banter, a church service, and farewells at the airport, then, the protagonists are up and aloft for their fatal flight.  Bayona doesn't bother to establish the characters of his movie, more than half of whom will end up dead anyway in the first half-hour.  (It's probably significant that the rugby team is called "The Old Christians.")  The viewer can't keep track of the young man, although they are scrupulously named, but, as the film progresses, some of them become sufficiently salient to be identifiable to the viewer.  The movie isn't really a study in character; the extreme exigencies of the plight of the aircrash victims flattens them all into the mold of either survivor, all of more or less equal in desperation, or one of the dead.  There is a cunning trick played on the audience with respect to a voice-over narrator who identifies his team members and plane-mates when they are killed and, now and then, interjects some commentary to the events.  Toward the end of the film, the quasi-poetic voice-over from Numa, the 25-year old narrator, has a whispered, lyrical quality like the soft voices that sometimes underlie scenes in movies by Terrance Malick (for instance, The Thin Red Line) although Bayona is less philosophical and more pragmatic in the way he uses Numa's narration.  

Bayona's breakthrough film (he was previously a director of Spanish horror movies) was 2010's The Impossible, also an impressive if almost unbearably grim movie about the tsunami that ravaged Indonesia.  In that movie, there is about twenty minutes of exposition, a spectacular scene involving the tsunami, and, then, another ninety minutes of harrowing and gruesome narrative about surviving in the aftermath of the catastrophe.  The Society of the Snow is constructed in the same way.  After some business-like and efficient scenes establishing the situation, there is an impressive plane crash sequence, complete with shots of the plane ripping itself open on rocks, people being sucked out of the torn fuselage, and bones being broken like toothpicks in big close-ups.  After a blackout, the protagonists find themselves half-buried in the snow, about fifteen people dead or dying.  (Whenever someone dies in this movie, that person's name is shown on the screen in a title simulating the typing on an official report.)  After a horrendous night in the smashed fuselage, the survivors drag the dead out of the plane, tend to the wounded, and wait to be rescued.  But no one comes.  When a group of young men walk up the snowfield toward a ridge a thousand feet above the crash, they discover to their horror that the smashed fuselage blends into the glacier and can't be seen.  The plane has crashed in a snow-covered valley beneath high peaks and the area is totally desolate -- there aren't even any birds frequenting this glacial wilderness.  Later, the survivors set up a radio using batteries salvaged from the plane and learn that efforts to find them have been suspended due to bad weather and the fact that no one ever survives a crash of this sort in the Andes. After about ten days, the protagonists, after much debate and soul-searching, agree to eat the frozen corpses of the dead -- the bodies are apparently cut apart using broken glass by two cousins, the Strauch boys.  This happens off-screen and the characters are shown eating little pellets ofwhitish pink meat.  Things improve enough that the survivors expect that they will be rescued when the thaw occurs -- the crash occurred in the third week of October and, in the southern hemisphere, the young men think the snow will soften and melt in the third week of November.  The folks in the plane fuselage are telling jokes and making rhymes when an avalanche buries them.  This leads to more horrific episodes of characters suffocating in the snow.  No sooner do the survivors dig themselves out from this catastrophe than another avalanche buries them again.  These calamities result in about a dozen more casualties.  Numa, who emerges as the most dominant character in the film, has been training with a couple other young men for a long hike down out of the mountains.  The boys try to escape from the valley but the first night outside proves too cold for them.  Apparently, there are a enormous differentials between day and night time temperatures -- at one point, someone says that the t temperature drops 80 degrees when the sun goes down.  (This explains why the survivors can roll around in the snow during daytime without getting frost bite.)  Numa and a couple others finds the tail of the plane in which there are more suitcases, boxes of cigarettes (everyone smokes) and even a little food.  The team members planning to hike down into the inhabited part of Chile sew together some rain-proof insulation to make a sort of communal sleeping bag for use at night.  They set forth again but Numa, who has an infected leg wound, can't make the march and he limps back to the main shelter in the plane's fuselage.  Some more kids die due to inanition and wounds that have become suppurating abscesses.  The two member rescue party, with great effort, reaches a ridge but finds that their valley is surrounded by miles of white, mountainous terrain.  Nonetheless, they forge ahead, sustaining themselves on rotting human flesh.  By this time, they are sick and vomiting from the foul meat.  However, they reach a green valley and, while trying to catch a reptile for a meal, are discovered.  The surviving team members are rescued by helicopter.  We see nurses bathing skeletal men covered in unhealed wounds.  The ordeal lasted 72 days.  Sixteen of the 46 people on the plane survived the crash and their travails on the glacier.  Bayona, who is committed to naming names, lists them all as they are rescued.  The story of the so-called "Miracle of the Andes" has been told in a half-dozen books, an opera, and another half-dozen movies.  

The film is shot in very tight close-ups interspersed with long shots of the desolate mountains in which the fuselage, itself, appears as a mere speck in the white gorge among the peaks.  The method of direction doesn't call attention to itself except in the showy sequence of the crash and this is so frightening that the viewer doesn't have time to think about what is happening.  The picture is matter-of-fact and immersive and the acting seems to me impeccable.  Those who survive the ordeal remain alive due to luck.  There's really little or no heroism involved -- it's just a matter of some making it and others dying.  (In one scene, after the avalanche, a man says that he had to step on his wife buried below him to push himself up out of the snow -- she perished and he survives.)  The kids on the plain aren't particularly ingenious and there's no Robinson Crusoe flavor to the film -- the situation is so nightmarish that there's really nothing anyone can do but huddle together in the shattered plane and eat little candy-bar sized chunks of human flesh.  In one moving sequence, one of the kids who has hiked to safety, carefully buries his little parcel of meat near a stream, crossing himself and saying a prayer.  

You can't really like a movie of this sort.  It's well-observed, masterfully made, and harrowing.  If you like this sort of thing (grim survival films), it's well-done.  But if my plot summary above troubles you, stay away from this movie.  Your interest may be as Poe said "all absorbing" with respect to the horrific details but a movie like this doesn't really make you a better person -- the subject matter is so remote from ordinary experience that it's hard to evaluate and, although I thought the picture was gripping, I was happy when the film was over.  

Eastern Bloc Art at the Walker Art Center

 I drove one-hundred miles (two-hundred miles round trip) to see Multiple Realities:  Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc (1960's to 1980's at the Walker Art Center.  I would gladly cross the street to see this show so long as the street was not too wide and nor the sun too hot.  In other words, this exhibit is mildly interesting but, more or less, unimpressive -- the work on display doesn't conform to any standard canons for beauty, nor is it memorably ugly.  It's just grey and morose, more or less in keeping with the way things were behind the Iron Curtain in Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia (and similar places).  The former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia (and Poland as well) hosted a vibrant "new wave" or film renaissance during the twenty years covered by the show -- I am thinking of some of Andrzej Wajda's movies, Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie and W.R. the Mysteries of the Organism, as well Jan Svankmayer's scary and beautiful animated films.  But the show focuses on the conceptual art, by and large, as well as various sorts of avant-garde performance art and so the efflorescence of cinema in some of these Eastern Bloc nations is mostly ignored.  An exception is made for Vera Chytilova's Daisies, a remarkable surrealist film in the anarcho-feminist vein -- Daisies is funny and genuinely disturbing and a loop showing part of movie's climax, a food fight that evolves into a full-fledged orgy of gastronomical destruction, represents some of the more radical impulses in Eastern European feminism.  About a half of the art works on display have feminist implications.  These are largely drab installations involving sloganeering and lots of naked women inserted into political tableaux.  (There was a genre of feminism that operated by just showing lots of pubic hair -- I  don't think these interventions are particularly profound; a naked body isn't necessarily subversive or politically cogent; if this were the case, Rubens would be the most subversive painter who ever lived.)  A third of the stuff on display is Gay-oriented, also almost entirely dull pictures of people in bars, men wearing garter belts, and various cross-dressers.  The remaining objects have vaguely political implications -- for instance, there were a couple of exhibits showing Polaroids taken by STASI (State Security or secret police) operatives in East Germany. (The pictures were made so that the STASI agents, acting with commendable Germanic efficiency, could ransack people's apartments and, then, put everything back exactly as it was before the raid.)  An East German artist with the unprepossessing name of Cornelia Schleime produced some witty variants on images and reports in her own STASI file, including a memo that she doesn't seem to have many friends and favors "western style" clothing.  (Schleime also made a striking "Picture Diary" with thick paint, interesting drawings and collage images that seemed to me quite beautiful and an exception to the grim monochromatic Fluxus-influenced art on display.)

East Germany sponsored vibrant, if grisly, experimentation in performance and theater.  The chief exponent of this State-sanctioned avant-garde work was Heiner Mueller, the playwright most well-known for his work Hamletmaschine.  An artist named Lutz Daumbeil collaborated with Mueller (and several others) to create a large installation piece -- it's bombastic and ugly after the manner of Mueller's nasty theatrical practice (lots of vomiting and simulated copulation in his plays):  a film shows a mostly naked man wearing a Greek warrior's helmet (and other peculiar headpieces) pacing around stiff-legged under a shattered curtain flanked by distressed classical statuary and two big transparencies labeled Eigensinn ("Stubbornness") and Strafen ("Punishment") in brutal neo-expressionistic lettering.  The work is called "Revising of Herakles", referring to Heiner Mueller's theater work named Heracles that is largely concerned with excrement -- that is, Herakles cleaning out the Augean stables.  There's a final room featuring experimental music scores and works of optical art; that stuff is more colorful but it's not very interesting.  An exception to this generally bland and dull work in the show are four linocuts made by someone named Juergen Widdorf commissioned by the Leipzig Academy of Sports in the early 1960's.  The big images are laugh-out-loud funny.  Widdorf, apparently, persuaded the authorities that he was making neo-classical prints of athletes; in fact, Widdorf had great Communist credentials -- he taught drawing classes to East German border guards.  But the pictures are hilariously homo-erotic -- in one image, a group of East German workers look exactly like the Village People (minus the Indian Chief) in tight jeans bulging at the crotch, each hunky lad brandishing some kind of tool. some butch women are gathered around a swimming pool and, in another picture, a bunch of half-naked men pose while one of them points his camera at the groin of another man -- apparently, this is supposed to depict a Leipzig photography club.  The most explicit of the four big lino-cuts on display shows a bunch of naked men taking showers in a locker-room -- it looks like something by Tom of Finland, but, seemingly, the authorities thought it was an impressive depiction of the highly muscular physiques of East German youth.  These pictures were very funny and, on reflection, it might be worth looking at these things if you are in Minneapolis and have a spare half-hour to kill.  But the rest of the show is instantly forgettable.  

A collection of porcelain works (coffee mugs and vases) and plywood assemblies by Tesuya Yamada on exhibit are similarly uninteresting.  This is a large show and it's handsome in a way, but the objects on display look like the sort of thing you could buy at Walmart or a Dollar General Store.  There's an interesting low plywood bench with brown cow-patty-shaped ceramics on which to rest your butt if you want to sit.  

Part of the fun in going to the Walker Art Center is to observe the other visitors and security in the galleries.  There are several angry-looking Transsexuals wearing mini-skirts and combat boots who are as interesting as works of art as most of the stuff on display.

Magic Mountains

 Magic Mountains (2024) shows us a new way (or ways) for a movie to be bad.  Beautifully filmed and edited, the picture is nothing if not stylish.  It's fairly suspenseful with a damsel in distress plot.  The characters are opaque and enigmatic with obscure motivations.  The picture looks great and has obtuse dialogue that seems influenced by Harold Pinter, but, ultimately, the movie is vacuous, caught between genres (it's either an elliptical study in existential isolation and anguish or some sort of mountain-climbing thriller).  The viewer is left with the strong sense of having been defrauded. The handsome appearance of the movie belies its plot defects, its unintentional absurdity and emptiness.  Emptiness in a movie can be cipher for existential angst or it can merely simulate feelings that art-house audiences are used to experiencing, without really earning that effect.  

Lars, a famous writer of bestselling novels, seems to be stalking his ex-girlfriend. Hannah.  He meets her in a bar where she is inexplicably waiting alone.  (The action seems to take place in Belgium).  We have no idea why this beautiful woman is alone in an empty bar under the surveillance of the handsome, if creepy, Lars.  She talks to Lars, a bad idea, and he announces that he has written the last of his bestselling "Emily novels", implying that Emily is a surrogate for Hannah who left him several years ago.  In a rather sinister manner, Lars says he is going to "retire" Hannah and won't write about her anymore.  But he wants closure and so he suggests a mountain-climbing excursion for the two of them.  (He claims they were always happiest while climbing together; Hannah responds that they always quarreled climbing down from the summit and, so, Lars says he will hire a helicopter -- he's now fabulously wealthy -- to take them down from the peak.)  Of course, Hannah, sensing malign motivations on Lars' part, turns down this ridiculous and overtly hostile invitation and the movie ends happily after about ten minutes.  I'm just kidding.  For inscrutable reasons, Hannah agrees to accompany her threatening ex-boyfriend on a trip to the mountains -- yes, just the two of them.  

Hannah and Lars stay at a cabin high in the Tatra Mountains, a range of the West Carpathians on the border between Poland and Hungary.  A Polish mountaineer, Voitek, lives in the cabin with his mother, a sweet grandmotherly figure who sings (untranslated) ballads to her son and the estranged couple.  Voitek, a handsome soulful figures, has contempt for Lars and says he prefers Bulgakov to his guest's novels.  (Later, in the movie, he uses one of Lars' books as kindling for a fire.)  After some tense exchanges between the arrogant Lars and the equally arrogant Voitek, the three set off for the high Tatras.  They camp out in the forest primeval after doing a test climb on a spire of rock to demonstrate that Hannah and Lars are sufficiently skilled for the trek to the summit on the next day.  The men are obviously suspicious of one another and Hannah suspects Lars of treachery.  So, of course, she refuses to climb with Lars the next day and the movie ends happily for her.  I'm  just kidding.  Hannah continues the expedition with the increasingly deranged Lars and, indeed, consents to climb in the sheer, barren wilderness dependent on Lars for her safety.  (Voitek who suspects Lars of bad intentions agrees to shadow Hannah at a discrete distance as they make the climb and gives her a whistle that she can use to summon him  if the novelist goes off the deep end and tries to harm her.)  There's a long spooky cave that leads through the bottom of talus field, emerging in a spectacular glacial cirque ringed by nasty-looking thousand foot cliffs.  Hannah senses that Voitek isn't actually following her -- she blows her whistle in the cave but the guide doesn't appear.  (It's implied that the soulful Voitek is in cahoots with Lars.)  So, of course, she crawls back through the cave into the meadow and forests, hikes back down to Voitek's cabin where his mom greets her and all ends well.  But, I'm just kidding -- even though Voitek now seems to be nowhere around, and even though Hannah has earlier fallen and been left to dangle off a cliff with no help from Lars, she decides "What the hell?" and continues her fatal climb with the completely psychotic and vengeful novelist.  (People with experience in mountaineering tend to be literal-minded -- they deride the movie for its poorly imagined climbing sequences, the fact that no one is dressed for this Alpine endeavor, and that no one has bothered to bring a radio or GPS system with them on this ill-considered expedition; characters seem to be climbing in their tennis shoes.)  

The climbing scenes are quite thrilling -- I don't know enough to critique technical details -- and the landscapes are forbidding and spectacular.  The film's photographers have a real gift for natural details and some sequences with water flowing over boulders or shaggy, tortured trees have a wonderfully palpable immediacy.  You can almost feel the cold and wet. But the movie is devoid of any common sense, ludicrous on its face, and, although fantastically stylish and elliptical in a tendentious way, there's no disguising the fact that the movie makes no sense.  It's a micro-budget murder movie with art-house pretensions.  The film's interest lies in its sophisticated surface, it's appearance, that almost deludes the viewer into thinking that they are seeing something not only beautiful, but profound.

The Curse

 Asher (Bennie Safdie) and Whitney (Emma Stone) are two self-absorbed yuppies working on a pilot for a HGTV reality show in the Showtime limited series The Curse.   The couple are frustrated with one another, neurotic, and (increasingly) unhappily married.  The situation is complicated by the director of their TV series, Dougy (Nathan Fieldler), a character who is both deeply sinister and ingratiating and, also, perhaps, a bit mad.  Whitney is self-confident and completely incapable of imagining how others perceive her -- she thinks she's a gracious, idealistic activist when, in fact, she's completely spoiled and self-aggrandizing.  By contrast, Asher is a tangle of masochistic impulses:  he perceives that Ashley is too good for him, obsesses about his small penis, and imagines degrading scenarios in which his wife sleeps with other men.  In one riveting, if horrifying scene, Asher is shown Whitney's disdain for him, pictured in sequences in which his wife mocks him shot for the TV show.  The material is profoundly humiliating and Asher storms out of the screening, only to return a minute later to tearfully plead for his wife's attention.  The show is unflinching in its portrayal of an intrinsically asymmetrical relationship -- Asher can't imagine life without Whitney and clings to her with a combination of ridiculously aggressive and, even, possessive gestures that oscillate between wild declarations of passion and humiliating supplication.  Whitney cares a little bit for Asher, but doesn't share his melodramatic jealousy and commitment.  The whole situation is configured to make the audience feel uncertain about the show's premise, episodes frequently revolving around cringe-inducing encounters between the couple and their orbit of friends.  (I use the word "friends" advisedly; Asher and Whitney are too selfish and narcissistic to really have any real friends, a point that the show makes repeatedly in a series of lacerating vignettes.)

It's hard to identify the exact tone of The Curse -- it seems to be a comedy, albeit one that involves characters so perilously close to clinical mental illness that it feels a little shameful to laugh at them.  The show is intensely observed and never less than gripping, but it's also very unsettling:  most of the episodes are shot like scenes from a horror movie. You're on edge expecting something terrible to occur -- and, when this happens in the last show, it occurs in spades.

Asher and Whitney are pitching a show to the home improvement network.  The show is initially called Flipanthropy based on the notion that the couple's houses are Green ecosystems, so-called "passive houses" that are carbon neutral.  The pair purport to community activism; they want to build a community of like-minded ecologically conscious people in the town where the show is set, improbably enough Espanola, New Mexico.  (Anyone who has driven through the grim, wasteland of Espanola understands what I mean; the place is an inescapable crossroads that you have to traverse when driving north of Santa Fe -- you end up there if you are going to see Georgia O'Keefe's Abiqui, Los Alamos, or Taos.  But the town seems impoverished, full of drunks and junkies, with sinister side-streets leading nowhere, a kind of open-air desert ghetto.)  The show, ostensibly about the couple's quixotic ambitions, really features the increasing dysfunction in Ashley and Whitney's marriage, a theme that Dougie exploits since he understands that network executives like reality shows with teeth in them -- in fact, Dougie delights in stirring up trouble for Asher with regard to Whitney and suggests that the real title of the program should be Green Queen since "every queen needs her jester" (in this case, the hapless Asher).  Of course, no one really wants to live in the bizarre mirror-walled houses that Ashley and Whitney are building -- the structures are impractical, hard to heat and keep cool, and very, very expensive.  Ultimately, no one bids on the second of the two houses built in Espanola and so Ashley has to recruit local people to act as if they are interested in the project.  (The guy living in the first house built discards the "induction" oven and puts in a gas-fired range in defiance of Whitney's ecological;y correct demands.)  Whitney's relationship with the local pueblos is problematic.  She dutifully recites a land declaration with the Tiwa (or Tewa -- the confusion is never really solved) governor acknowledging that the houses occupy property misappropriated by colonialist oppression from the local Native Americans.  But in the same breath she is quick to proclaim that the tribe has no legal rights to anything that she is building, expressly stating that tribal concerns about the land don't apply to her title and her easements.  Whitney has an acquaintance who is a Native American artist -- but her protestations that she is "friends" with the woman are, more or less, rebuffed by the artist.  (Whitney has to pay for her friendship -- she engages the artist to work for her as a consultant on the basis of a $20,000 contract, the funds paid in cash borrowed from Whitney's parents who are, in effect, slumlords who own apartments in the vicinity.)  Whitney's community-spirited ventures all fail.  She starts a coffee shop but it tanks. She runs an emporium that sells expensive jeans.  But when local people start to shoplift from her she simply tells the counter-girl and clerk to put the stolen items on her own (Whitney's) credit card.  Of course, this isn't sustainable.  She and Asher hire a local thug to provide security -- he was supposed to work as a barista in their failed coffee shop and they have promised him a job.  The man brings a long-gun to work and has a pistol tucked in his pocket, weapons that horrify the liberal-progressive Whitney.  This fellow thinks that Whitney's policy of looking the other way when locals steal from her is "a cancer" eating away at the community -- in other words, he opposes Whitney's refusal to call the cops on shoplifters.  

The show's title The Curse refers to a little girl of Somali ethnicity who puts a "tiny curse" (as she calls it) on Asher when he stiffs her with respect to some cans of pop that she is selling to support her impoverished family.  The "tiny curse" is that Whitney and Asher's Pad Thai take-out will not have chicken among the noodles -- "I take away your chicken," she says.  (Before Asher discovers the nature of the curse, he is angry that the Pad Thai that he has ordered has been delivered without chicken; later, someone sticks chicken in a toilet that he is using at a fire station where part of the show is being filmed -- Dougie has encouraged the firemen to flirt with Whitney about their big hoses.  Dougie buys a whole chicken at a Mexican restaurant and, then, goes to the Somali girl's house to see if she will curse him -- she refuses.  But Dougie and Asher get into a terrible fight, involving in part the director's wife who was apparently killed in a drunk driving incident in which Dougie was involved.  So Dougie, then, curses Asher.)  There's a great scene in which Asher is told to not talk about curses by the Somali girl's father -- "they get in your head," the man says.  Asher asks if this is part of his culture.  The man nods.  "Well, where are your from?" Asher asks.  "Minnesota," the man replies.    

The appearance of The Curse is really extraordinary and the peculiar manner in which the show is staged and shot embodies an important theme.  Conventional film grammar is mostly repudiated for nine-tenths of the show:  images appear on grainy, distressed film-stock, impressionistically blurred and bleached-out as if shot on a poorly functioning cell-phone.  Framing is unconventional and, whenever possible, the characters are shot through a palimpsest of foreground figures, bars and blurred obstructions.  Generally, camera angles suggest that the cameraman is spying on the characters, taking pictures of them covertly.  Figures are often too far away f rom the camera to register their features clearly.  Everyone is framed between walls or trapped in niches and alcoves; the sense of claustrophobia induced by this staging is palpable -- the characters are confined by the interiors in which they exist, perversely shot through tiny apertures in walls, slot windows, or only partially opened doors.  Mirrors are everywhere so that the viewer is never certain whether he or she is seeing a reflection or an actual image; in some scenes, entire landscapes full of cars and pedestrians are visible as reflections on glass surfaces through which we glimpse the characters.  This distancing technique, obstructing the viewers understanding of the images, is carried to perverse extremes; some dialogue scenes are filmed from interior rooms in which we see people in the foreground watching TV or a secretary typing on her computer -- the part of the image to which we are supposed to be attending is only partially visible through a slit of window in a corner of the frame.  Eye-lines don't match -- in one early scene, Dougie flirts aggressively with Whitney but the two of them remain in separate small enclosures that don't intersect in any way and they seem to be looking away from each other.  There are many so-called "empty frames" -- that is, shots of random exteriors that seem accidental:  these images don't have the classical composure of Ozu's "empty shots"; they aren't carefully composed and appear arbitrary with no real thematic connection to the plot or adjacent dialogue.  The "passive houses" that Asher and Whitney are promoting are entirely glass , made from mirrors and so they simply vanish into the dusty shrubbery in which the buildings are set -- you literally can't see them.  It's only in the 9th episode when a pilot of the HGTV show is screened that we can actually see the mirror-houses and understand their layout.  The alienating manner in which the great bulk of The Curse is shot is intended to contrast in the strongest possible way with conventional TV photography, shown to be lucid, bright, schematic, and, even, in some cases, equipped with helpful arrows and other diagram signs. (We are shown this type of footage in the pilot of the HGTV show.)  The entire strategy of the show's mise-en-scene is to repudiate the typical techniques used to produce Home Improvement shows or, in the last (10th) episode, TV cooking programs.  

I suppose a "spoiler" alert is here mandatory although I doubt the application of that term to the jaw-dropping finale to The Curse.  A "spoiler" is the description of a plot development that the viewer could reasonably anticipate from clues and foreshadowing in the show leading up to its last episode.  But in The Curse, the show's ending is so surreal and, seemingly, arbitrary that telling you what happened isn't going to spoil anything in the rest of the show for you.  There's no careful groundwork laid for the last episode which strikes like a bolt out of blue.  But you have been forewarned.

In the 10th and last show, a year has passed.  Asher and Whitney appear on a screen projected on a wall on the set of the live-shot Rachel Ray cooking show.  (Rachel is making meatballs with a mobster who has published an Italian cookbook.)  Asher and Whitney are on-camera to promote the second season of their TV show called Green Queen.  Whitney is clearly pregnant; Asher grins like a jack-o-lantern.  Rachel Ray pays no attention to them and scarcely allows Whitney to promote her show; Asher's efforts to talk about their baby -- who will be featured in the second series that the network has picked-up -- don't seem to interest Rachel and she reverts to flirting with mob boss in an embarrassing way.  Asher and Whitney are shown in Espanola where their appearance has been filmed.  They are doting over their unborn baby. (It turns out that the passive house, always described as a thermos bottle, is not good for the baby and, so, Whitney has hired a contractor to subvert the home's design to provide more consistent air conditioning in the child's room.) As a gift to her, Asher decides to deed the house in which the Somali father and his daughters are squatting to the immigrants.  Together, they go to the house where they are met by the father who is clearly distrustful and seems completely unimpressed by their benevolent generosity.  (The little girls are not home and we see a figure traipsing around the background in the house who seems sinister and whose identity is never established.)  The Somali father's lack of gratitude is disconcerting.  In the next scene, a cell-phone alarm sounds.  Whitney wakes up to find Asher inexplicably plastered on the ceiling of the "passive" mirror home.  Gravity has been reversed for Asher and, for some reason, he is falling upwards, that is, being pulled away from the surface of the earth into the air.  Asher's dilemma, involving creeping around on the ceiling like a spider, is compounded by the fact that Whitney has gone into labor  After desperate machinations to get her cell-phone (Asher thinks the house is causing the gravitational inversion), Whitney is taken to the hospital with her burly male Doula, Moses.  Moses isn't too helpful because the child's presentation is breech requiring a C-section.  Meanwhile, Asher ends up outside, clinging to a branch on a nearby tree resisting the violent pull upward by the reversal in his gravitational field.  Dougie is called and taunts Asher for climbing a tree to escape the obligations of paternity and the rescue crews also misconstrue Asher's posture high above the ground -- they mistakenly believe that he is about to jump to his death.  Ever the opportunist, Dougie calls for a drone and launches a camera to better photograph Asher's plight.  As the infant is cut out of Whitney's womb, Asher is "freed" from the tree with a chainsaw that drops the branch to which he is clinging while freeing him to blast straight up into the sky.  Asher ends up in outer space, presumably dead or dying.  Some neighbors speculate that the whole thing was a stunt to gin up interest in the HGTV show.  The camera prowls around the mean streets of Espanola and the show ends.

The sequences involving Asher's fight to stay earthbound in the face of a gravitational pull upward are staged with great and fearsome authority.  Although the condition is bizarre, the show imagines Asher's plight effectively and presents his upside-down exploits with impressive aplomb.  The effect of the show's last forty minutes is Kafkaesque in the sense that the imagery resists symbolic or allegorical interpretation -- like Gregor Samsa's transformation into an insect, Asher's desperate situation must be accepted as simply an inexplicable vagary in the laws of nature; it's not clear that his tendency to fall upward into outer space means anything at all.  There is some sense that Whitney's childbirth may ground her and hold her down -- this what having children means.  By contrast, poor Asher ends up doomed, drifting in outer space.  In a way, the show is about establishing "roots" in a place and community; Asher and Whitney are privileged, selfish, and, I suppose, "rootless" -- this is exemplified by Asher's fatal difficulties in the last episode.  But this interpretation is too glib, too facile, I think, and the utterly confounding climax to The Curse has to be accepted on its own terms -- it is an instance of the inexplicable that can't really be decoded.  

Poor Things

 Poor Things is an episodic, picaresque movie with horror overtones.  The movie uses the story of Frankenstein's monster to explore moral and ethical issues.  In many ways, the film is squarely situated within the territory of Rousseau's Emile or Voltaire's Candide -- Poor Things is a filmed Bildungsroman with an emphasis on carnal knowledge. (The movie is already famous for its many explicit sex scenes).  The picture feels somewhat formless and has a strange coda in its last twenty minutes that seems excessive in all respects, a nod to horror movie conventions.  That said, the movie is beautifully produced on all levels -- indeed, if anything it is almost too visually opulent.  Emma Stone is excellent as Bella Baxter, the Frankenstein monster; Willem Dafoe is poignant as her hideously scarred creator -- she calls him God.  Mark Ruffalo makes an effective caddish man-about-town and the movie features superb cameo appearances by Kathryn Hunter as the Dickensian brothel-keeper Madame Swiney and Hannah Schygulla as a philosophical older woman that Bella meets on a cruise across the Mediterranean.  The picture is a voluptuous visual feast with elaborate belle epoque (Jugendstil) sets, radiant seascapes and cities under lowering, turbulent skies that look like scenery in paintings by Albrecht Altdorfer or Jacob Ruisdael -- purplish clouds are ripped asunder by apocalyptic beams of light and strange lighter-than-air vessels ply the heavens.  Buildings seem half-melted with colossal figures draped over doorways and strange baroque curves and expressive round window like eyes.  The cities of London, Lisbon, Alexandria, and Paris, to name some of the locations, are depicted in terms of complicated courtyards, peculiar and eccentric flights of stairs and great fairy-tale facades half-visible in the distance, sun-gilded domes and minarets.  The movie is populated with various grotesques; the habitues of the brothel where Bella works are particularly memorable, deformed looking apparitions with bulging, hideous eyes. Small horror film details abound in the corners of the frame -- there are ducks with pig heads, dogs spliced to swans, and all sorts of grotesques manufactured by God, Bella's creator.  The movie is an unstable combination of ravishing pictorial beauty and disturbingly hideous imagery -- people perform surgery on themselves and there are forty or so cadavers lying around in various states of disassembly.  When Bella returns to God's laboratories in his wildly curvilinear palace, she inhales deeply -- "Formaldehyde," she says, the smell of home. The movie is somewhat schematic and makes its points without any subtlety but it's beautiful written, with elaborate, highly stylized diction and speeches that never falter with respect to wit and intelligence.  Clearly every element of this movie has been carefully imagined and lovingly transferred onto the screen for maximum authority and effect.  The movie is heartless, but this is to be expected.  As with all other movies made by director Yorgos Lanthimos, you watch with a coldly clinical eye with your emotions mostly disengaged so that you can follow the film's argument.  It's like reading something by Alexander Pope -- the rococo effects all fall into perfect place and snap shut with rhymed couplets; the imagery is almost too rich -- it's a feast for the eye and mind but you remain strangely disengaged from the grotesque events depicted.

Beginning in black-and-white (after a spectacular opening shot of a woman plunging to her death from a Victorian-era bridge -- the water of the river looks dark and vicious like the Styx), the movie chronicles the adventures of Bella Baxter, God's creation.  Dafoe's character has fished the suicide, a woman named Victoria Blessington, out of the river, dissected her belly, and removed her full-term fetus.  God has, then, placed infant's brain in the adult woman's cranium.  The result is a beautiful fully mature woman with the mind of an infant.  The movie chronicles how this infant's brain develops and how she comes to full consciousness as a human being -- in effect, the film is the story of one person's education from infancy to maturity.  In its first fifteen minutes, the picture channels The Miracle Worker showing a willfully violent and destructive toddler in a woman's body.  Sex begins the baby's education -- first, Bella, as she is called by her creator, begins to masturbate, then, she makes advances on her tutor, a young man that God has hired to document the phases in her intellectual growth.  God wants Bella to remain always at his side -- he loves her with the suffocating warmth of a parent.  But he is willing to regulate her sexual passions by espousing her to his assistant -- he sees this as part of her education.  Bella is sexually adventurous however, and wants to have adventures, mostly with respect to "wild jumping" which is what she calls sexual intercourse.  She elopes with Mark Ruffalo's character, a seducer who quickly learns that he has bitten off way more than he can chew.  Bella is sexually insatiable and wears him out.  She is also intellectually adventurous -- we see her reading Emerson and demanding that she learn about philosophy.  Like the young lord Siddhartha, she has no knowledge of human suffering.  But in Alexandria, she gazes down into a slum that is like a hideous open grave and sees corpses and women with dead and dying babies.  Horrified by this spectacle, she gives away all of the money that she and her lover have accumulated.  By this time, the ruthless lawyer played by Ruffalo is smitten by her, jealous, and possessive and he's appalled when he finds she has given all their treasure to the poor -- actually to a couple of dishonest ship stewards.  Bella ends up in Paris where she works in a brothel.  These scenes allow the filmmaker to insert a whole panoply of perverse sex acts into the picture, imagery that is either comical or disturbing.  The lawyer can't abide Bella's whoring and so she gives him some money and tells him that he should return to London.  After a time, Bella learns that God is dying of cancer and so she returns home to be by his side. (By this time, she has become something of a feminist and socialist as well.)  She meets her tutor again, a gentle and kind man whom she is now willing to marry -- she has, as it were, sown her wild oats.  On her wedding day, a man appears to disrupt her nuptials; this is Victoria Blessington's husband, the officer married to the heroine when she threw herself off the bridge in the movie's opening scene.  The soldier asserts his claim on Bella and inexplicably she walks away from her wedding to the mild-manner and kindly tutor and to join the sadistic military officer at his remote manor -- his chest is a salad of medals and he constantly brandishes a gun.  The depraved British military officer  threatens his servants with a revolver and plots to surgically mutilate Bella --he plans to amputate her clitoris.  The military man is a dyed-in-the-wool villain of the most villainous sort and, I think, a sort of blemish on the film; this stuff is too histrionic and exaggerated even by the terms of this movie.  It's also baffling that Bella, who now has extensive experience of the world, would voluntarily join this man, a fellow who is obviously vicious and cruel.  However, the final scenes with the military officer set up the movie's horror film finale -- a climax that is little like the ending of Freaks.  

It seems like about half of the film involves sex scenes of various kinds.  Bella's education is sexual and she constructs her sense of self around these liaisons.  Emma Stone is fearless and, like Isabelle Huppert, willing to expose herself, both literally and figuratively, in ways that would be inaccessible to most actresses.  The role requires her to develop from a uninhibited, monstrous, infant into a sophisticated courtesan and woman-of-the world; the amplitude of her performance is astounding and she throws herself without reservation into all phases of the character's sexual pilgrimage .  The amount of sex and nudity in the movie is a throw-back to the seventies, when actresses were far more uninhibited about their appearances onscreen -- whether the amount of sex in Poor Things is excessive, that is, a bad thing or good thing will depend upon the tastes of the viewer.  But this aspect of the film is its most notable feature.  By contrast, Willem Dafoe plays a neutered monster -- he seems to be have been systematically tortured by his gruesome father, apparently Baron Frankenstein himself:  at one point, for instance, he father broke both of his thumbs when he was a child to see how if the bones would remain infantile in size when the rest of his body developed into adulthood.  (This is not the worst of the things that were done to  him.)  As with all the details amassed by the movie, the make-up and prosthetic work used with Dafoe is remarkable -- the character has to be horribly mutilated but also endearing and his features need to be recognizable and expressive beneath the make-up.  All of the film's incidental features are profoundly intentional and aggregate toward making the effects that the movie wishes to achieve -- this applies to Dafoe's make-up, the Brueghel-like animal composite monsters, the sets and brooding, ominous music, even the titles that have an elongated, somewhat tortured appearance.  Everything is designed and engineered exquisitely to create an effect that is both fascinating, but, also, stifling.  The movie's images and scene-setting are so lush and detailed as to be overpowering and it's a relief when this thing is over.

The film is based on a book by the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray (he died in 2019).  Gray was an important novelist in his time, best known for his first book Lanark, but, also, the author of a number of other novels, including Poor Things.  Gray's work derives from Tristram Shandy and is full of idiosyncratic post-modern devices -- narratives are embedded in essays with footnoted commentaries on commentaries.  Yorgis Lanthimos seems to have extracted the post-Modern shenanigans from Poor Things and, in fact, films the central narrative in the novel as if it were a work by Dickens or Flaubert -- that is, the playfulness of Gray's approach to this lurid material is suppressed.  I don't view this as a defect, but it's different from the author's vision of the novel -- as should be the case with a fully imagined film.  Some parts of the movie that don't work, in my estimation, seem to derive from elements of the book that have been retained but, not, as it were, fully digested.  (This includes the horror-film coda involving the vicious Major Blessington and several minor characters, including another version of Bella, a beautiful girl also created by God who is supposed to correct the willful and headstrong aspects of the heroine, but who remains a baffling cipher in the picture.)  

Simply put, Poor Things dwarfs the other movies released in the summer of 2023.  It's infinitely better than Barbie, a silly and frivolous picture (but also somehow heavy and tedious), better than Oppenhemer which is well-made but ultimately inconsequential, much lighter on its feet than the grave and death-inflected Killers of the Flower Moon.  It's undoubtedly the best picture of the year from a technical standpoint.  But it's not exactly likeable and, despite all the sex, the film is very frigid.  But this is by design.  Poor Things is self-contained, insular, and it doesn't care if you like it or not.  

Godland

 Godland (Hylnur Palmason 2023) is advertised as being about a young pastor's loss of faith when confronted with the tribulations of the Icelandic wilderness.  This may seem promising, but it misrepresents the movie.  In fact, Godland concerns a highly parochial subject, the fraught relationship between Danish and Icelandic speaking people in the former Danish colony around 1870.  This subject matter is reflected in the film's title -- the movie is called both Volatha Land  (Icelandic) and Vanskable Land (Danish), both names translating to the English Godland.  Palmason notes that Denmark annexed Iceland in the medieval period and ruled the place from Copenhagen for five-hundred years -- Iceland achieved some measure of self-governance in 1918 and opportunistically seized full independence during Denmark's occupation by the Nazis in 1944 (that story involving Iceland's complicity with the German occupiers is a vexed aspect of the the country's history).  In his interview on the Criterion disk of the film, Palmason observes that Iceland's slow-motion separation from Denmark was "very soft" and that the subject is, perhaps, not intrinsically interesting -- there are no freedom fighters, martyrs, or terrorism.  Apparently, there was some fairly significant hostility between speakers of the two languages, perhaps, because linguistic distinctions also had socio-economic implications, although Palmason is far too austere a film maker to dramatize anything of this sort.  (In fact, Palmason is so rigorous that he scarcely dramatizes anything at all; he's a highly ascetic filmmaker.)  In any event, the viewer should be forewarned:  the movie isn't about anything likely to be the subject of banter at your next cocktail party; rather, the film is essentially about two men who for reasons of pride refuse to speak one another's language with ultimately dire, if mostly inexplicable, consequences.   The film is ultimately disappointing and very ineptly made -- crucial plot elements are left in obscurity not as a tease to the viewer, or to inspire thought, but because Palmason was too lazy to work out these details.  ("Lazy" is the wrong word; the film was made over a three-year period, extensively re-written and re-imagined from its original scenario -- "indifferent" is a better word; Palmason in the interview made part of the Criterion CD admits that he's uninterested in plot and this shows in the film.)  The movie is very beautiful but this is a by-product of Iceland's majestic landscapes -- anywhere you point your camera, you will record spectacular images.  For this reason, shows like the 2024 iteration of True Detective are filmed in Iceland although the show is ostensibly set in Alaska; Iceland is the new Monument Valley for the 2020's and, it seems, that half of the population of the small nation is somehow involved in filmmaking.  

The first third of Godland is the best part of the movie.  A Lutheran pastor named Lucas is dispatched to Iceland, apparently to build a church in a remote area.  (Iceland was converted in 1000 and piously Lutheran after the Reformation -- exactly why a mission to Iceland is required in 1870 is unclear; the movie doesn't bother to explain the hero's mission to a place that is already full of churches and parishioners.  There is some implication that an exploding volcano may have displaced people to another part of the island, although why these folks wouldn't move with their pastors among them in unexplained.)  The Bishop in Denmark portentously warns the hero that the volcanoes smell so bad it is "as if the land shat its pants" and that the odor of sulfur (and the interminable summer days) drives people mad.  Lucas sets sail and tries, unsuccessfully, to learn Icelandic on the vessel.  The language is daunting -- it has, we learn, at least 20 variant words for rainfall.  But, one would think that an educated man would be able to master at least the rudiments of the language before reaching his destination -- and aren't there books in Danish providing instruction in Icelandic?  In any event, Lucas is set down on a wholly uninhabited and desolate shore.  A group of about 6 Icelanders led by the formidable Ragnar meet him and are charged with escorting the pastor over dangerous and wild country to some place about a week's travel away.  Again, Palmason doesn't have a rational motivation for this bravura sequence, about forty minutes of spectacular landscape photography depicting the cross-country slog on wiry, furry Icelandic ponies.  Why didn't this idiot priest sail to Rekyavik and, if he wanted to see the landscapes, make forays out into the country from that place?  Much of the plot is motivated by Lucas' hobby -- he is an amateur glass-plate photographer and he carries on his back an elaborate kit including the bulky camera, it's stilt-like tripod, plates and chemicals, and, even, a tarp used for developing glass plates in the field.  Lucas has a cross that is about four feet tall -- why he's carrying this thing is also inexplicable.   There are certainly plenty of crosses in Iceland. But it's a burden that the Icelanders reasonably resent; Ragnar suggests sawing the thing in two.  (The cross gets dropped in a river and floats away, never to be seen again except in a few morose inserts wallowing in the water.)  The pastor isn't particularly religious, doesn't seem pious just socially inept, and his real religion is obviously his hobby -- that is, photography; he's more attached to his camera equipment  that the accoutrements of his faith.  Tensions arise during the arduous trip cross-country.  Ragnar describes Lucas as a "Danish devil" and, although he obviously understands the priest's language, he refuses to speak to him in that tongue.  While crossing a swollen river, one of the travelers falls from his horse, is swept away and drowns.  (Ragnar has opposed crossing the river; Lucas, who is an idiot, demands that they cross -- it's not clear why he's in a hurry.  Viewers are baffled when Ragnar inexplicably agrees to the dangerous river crossing with fatal results.)  Midway through the movie it's obvious that Palmason's objectives are in bad faith -- he doesn't want to explain anything and just wants to leave the viewer confused.  The people wander around singing utterly impenetrable folk songs -- either lists of names or ballads about trolls cutting people up into pieces while referring to them with honorifics.  The characters do things that make no sense:  two men strip down and stand in the mist from a thousand-foot waterfall -- it looks like it's about 40 degrees.  Why would anyone do this?  People are always trudging through water -- don't their feet get cold and doesn't this damage their boots?  Ragnar does weird calisthenics every morning that seem to be part of some religious ritual.  What's this about?  The problem is epitomized with shot of steaming horse dung early in the movie.  A large pink earthworm is crawling in the horse dung.  What is this supposed to show?  Are we supposed to think that the earthworm came out of the horse -- that is, that the pony had worms?  Or did Palmason happen to find an earthworm crawling on the ground and just put on the dung?  (The obviously freshly deposited horse-shit would be on top of the worm not below it.) The shot makes no sense and does nothing but confuse the viewer.  Ultimately, Lucas, who is very bad horseman, falls off his animal and goes into some sort of suspended animation or coma -- he has his eyes open and we think he's dead.  In fact, this is just some sort of state of extreme exhaustion as imagined (implausibly) by Palmason and designed to further baffle the viewer.  The end of the picturesque first part of the film is signaled by gaudy shots of volcanoes erupting (where?  how is this related to the movie?) and, then, luscious underwater footage of young women frolicking in waist-deep tidal pools -- don't people in Iceland get cold when they dip themselves in frigid 35 degree sea water?  

The second half of the movie details Lucas' attempts to assimilate with the community where he builds the church.  The place is like one of John Ford's isolated farms in Monument Valley, a stony seaside with huge boulders fallen from pinnacles of rock jutting up over the sea-shore.  How or why anyone would live in such a place is unclear.  A Danish-speaking merchant (what does he sell? where? our of what kind of store?) lives in a nice clapboard house with a piano and pleasant amenities.  The merchant, who is named Carl, wryly asks Lucas why he came "the long way" -- that is, cross-country. (Where's his wife?  Why isn't there any trace of her?)  "You could have just sailed here," the merchant speaking for the viewer says.  Lucas stammers that he wanted to see the country and its people to which the merchant responds:  "So how many people did you see out there?" The answer, of course, is none.  Carl doesn't want Lucas who is  ahaggard, ugly Ichabod Crane kind of guy, messing around with his attractive nubile daughter, Anna.  But, of course, Anna is interested in the ghastly pastor and seduces him.  (There's a scene in which Lucas takes a picture of Anna and the two of them go into the canvas darkroom tent "to see what develops."  Dear reader, I kid you not.)  Ragnar is hanging around.  For some reason that Palmason doesn't bother to explain, Ragnar kills Lucas' horse -- except that Lucas doesn't have a horse so I guess it's Carl's pony that bites the dust here.  (The horse picturesquely decays over the course of two years in images shot at monthly intervals it seems -- the effect is like the decaying zebras and other animals in Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts.)  At a community dance, again staged like something out of John Ford's My Darling Clementine, the men stage a wrestling tournament -- in a grimly symbolic sequence the haggard pastor wrestles first Carl, whom he beats, and, then, the burly Ragnar whom he fights to a draw (apparently since Palmason can't be bothered to resolve this fight sequence and just cuts away to a baby, presumably to underline the childishness of the endeavor, and, then, mist rolling over the mountain.)  Exactly how the frail Lucas, who nearly died of inanition two reels earlier, manages to defeat these tough Icelanders is another mystery that Palmason doesn't bother to solve.  Ultimately, Ragnar, who can speak perfectly fluent "Sunday Danish", demands that Lucas take his picture -- after all, he's been photographing everyone else. Lucas refuses, claiming that he's out of chemicals, and insults Ragnar.  There's another fight which the frail Lucas wins, killing Ragnar in the process.  The weakling Lucas can be pretty strong when the bizarre plot requires this.  At the inaugural church ceremony, Lucas hears Ragnar's dog barking (a baby is also crying) and, in a scene cribbed from Macbeth, darts outside and falls, getting his vestments all muddy.  (No one seems to wonder what has happened to Ragnar who has just disappeared -- I think the explanation is that Ragnar supposedly has departed Carl's ranch for the other side of the island.)  Lucas flees on horseback but he's an inept rider and Carl catches up with him easily.  Carl stabs Lucas to death for no reason that I could figure out and, like his pony, poor Lucas is left out in the elements to decay and "become part of the earth and flowers" as Carl's younger daughter, Inga, says.  (Palmason has cast his own daughter in this role and she's very good.)

The film is shot in old Academy (pillar-box) aspect and its very beautiful -- although, of course, a chimp with a camera could take beautiful landscapes in Iceland.  The people that Lucas films are painted white for the camera and have a funereal aspect -- this relates to the Roland Barth's notion of photography as a mortuary art, a way of embalming the dead.  As in Fargo, there's an opening title that says that the film is based on a box discovered in Iceland containing seven glass plate photographs.  Like the whole film, this is a fraud.  There's a riddle as to whether Lucas could, in fact, have taken a picture of Ragnar, thereby averting the two killings at the end of the film.  I counted the number of pictures that we see Lucas making and come to a total of six (if you don't count a picture Lucas may have taken of the Bishop in Copenhagen which, presumably, would not have been transported to Iceland.  But the number of glass plates actually exposed is a red herring since Lucas says he can't take the photograph of Ragnar because he is out of silver nitrate -- so the number of exposures made, like most everything else, in this comically inept movie means nothing at all.  Lucas is played by an actor who bears a resemblance to the young Max von Sydow in The Seventh Seal -- but an much uglier version of that performer.