Joe Queenan: Foreign Duty

I was sure that things were going to improve dramatically when I went to see Benoit Jacquot's Seventh Heaven, but here again I got my hopes smashed to smithereens. Seventh Heaven deals with a woman who cannot have orgasms because her father died when she was only six years old and she hasn't been happy since. Inevitably, Mathilde becomes a shoplifter to cope with her pain. One day she is caught stealing in a toy store, faints and is remanded to the custody of a mysterious hypnotist who seems to have some informal relationship with this decidedly unorthodox retail establishment. The hypnotist waltzes Mathilde off to lunch and asks her to describe the layout of her apartment. Based on her responses, he decides that she must relocate her bedroom to another room in the house. In not so many words, he tells her to go home and feng shui her apartment. When she comes back for some more hypnosis sessions, he feels her up while she's suspended in a deep trance, then overcharges her.

Immediately thereafter, Mathilde has her first orgasm with her husband, Nico, who becomes suspicious that his wife is having an affair, so he starts following her. Now he's the one who can't have any orgasms. So he starts visiting his own overcharging hypnotist, but the hypnotist is a dud, and things go downhill from there. Clearly, this marriage needs a lot of work.

By this point, I was starting to have second thoughts about my decision to jettison American films just because they were unbelievably dumb. At several points in this stilted, incoherent, pretentious film, where people spend a lot of time sitting around in cafes smoking and discussing their problems, I kept hoping that a tidal wave or an asteroid the size of Texas or a mutant reptile would burst in and pep things up a bit. I also wished the audiences would get a bit more animated. It was really starting to piss me off that everyone around me at these cultured events appeared to be comatose. Though I'd rented a number of French, Japanese, German and Chinese films in the past few years, I hadn't gone to the theater to see a foreign film since The Postman in 1995. I'd completely forgotten that for foreign-film buffs, attending these screenings was a nigh on religious experience, where everyone just kind of sat there, transfixed, exhibiting no visible reaction to what was transpiring on the screen, even when the dialogue was completely ridiculous. I had forgotten that in the rarefied world of foreign films, what transpires on the screen is supposed to be treated with a mixture of reverence and awe, and you aren't supposed to laugh when dialogue like this appears in the subtitles:

Unethical French Hypnotist: "You'll feel better once you've eaten."

French Kleptomaniac Who Can't Have Orgasms: "I'm not hungry."

Unethical Hypnotist: "Neither am I. Come."

Or this:

Sleazy French Hypnotist: "Have you ever had an orgasm?"

Sex-Starved French Klepto-Kitten: "No."

Sleazy Hypnotist: "Waiter, some blank paper, please."

My subsequent filmgoing experiences reinforced my mounting dread that I had bitten off more than I could chew when I'd made the hasty decision to give American films the old heave-ho. Although the critics assured me that Western, a road movie about two ne'er-do-wells searching for love in Brittany, would win my heart, it actually made me want to strangle somebody. To me, the essential component of a great road movie is a road like the one in Rain Man or Easy Rider or Thelma & Louise. For a road movie to work, the characters have to travel hundreds and even thousands of miles, with the very immensity of the voyage serving as a cartographic symbol of the vast emotional distance the characters have traveled. The characters can't just hitchhike 15 kilometers farther down a country road in Brittany, a region roughly the size of my backyard. When the characters in a road movie set out on that long, lonesome highway, it's absolutely imperative that the long, lonesome highway be long.

There were a few other things that annoyed me about Western. One, there was way too much smoking. Two, the soundtrack sounded like an evil synthesis of Jim Croce and the Gipsy Kings. And three, the director had the characters sit around endlessly discussing the meaning of life so the cameraman could take the next half hour off for cassoulet.

It wasn't until I saw The Saltmen of Tibet that I fully realized what a fool I'd been to so cavalierly cut myself off from films targeted at every knuckleheaded frat boy in the U.S. The Saltmen of Tibet is a Swiss/German documentary that follows a group of nomadic herdsmen and their 160-yak caravan as they trek to the sacred Himalayan lakes to gather raw salt for their assorted saline needs. Much of the conversation involves yaks.

"The other three have gone to look for the yak herd," observes one typically laconic nomadic tribesman.

"What are we to do with this poor little yak?" says another.

For the first time since I'd embarked on my self-imposed exile from American films, I found myself fantasizing about how good Uma Thurman probably looked in that tight black catsuit. Sure, I'd heard that The Avengers bit the big one, but I'd just paid $8.50 to watch a movie about a dying yak and the noble yak herders who would long mourn its passing. So who was I to be choosy? Frankly, Uma was looking better and better with each passing minute.

For the sake of my own well-being, I was forced to take a few days off and think things through. In the end, I had to admit to myself that this whole foreign film thing was one huge scam. Long ago, when giants ruled the earth, foreign films were impressive technical achievements that served as a viable counterpoint to their more explicitly commercial, far less cerebral American cousins. But the movies I'd been watching weren't foreign movies in the sense of Jules and Jim or Aguirre: The Wrath of God. They were mostly just cloying, technically retrograde clattertrap that happened to have been made in a foreign country. There was nothing special about them. They were dull. They were predictable. They sucked.

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