Worn down by brainless summer blockbusters, Joe Queenan swore off crass Hollywood fare and vowed to return to a cinematic diet of sensitive, intelligent foreign films like the ones that illuminated his youth. He lasted a week.
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Several months ago, I suffered through Godzilla, the film in which the French government sets off a nuclear explosion somewhere in the South Pacific, thereby making it impossible for a genetically mutated Matthew Broderick to ever act again. The same week, I gritted my teeth and languished through Deep Impact, the film in which half the population of the East Coast of the United States is wiped out by a tidal wave engineered by unscrupulous hair stylists determined to make sure that the heavily banged Kewpie doll played by Tea Leoni is really dead. Finally, a few weeks later, I sat through Armageddon, the film in which Bruce Willis and a bunch of roughneck oil drillers accept a temporary job on an asteroid hurtling toward planet Earth because the Texas economy is on the ropes, the benefits in outer space are better and Liv Tyler's pouting makes them anxious to leave this solar system.
Each of these movies was implacably stupid. More stupid than the usual drivel I had to watch as part of my job. In fact, the extreme discomfort I experienced sitting in theaters watching this troika of moronic, vastly overhyped, utterly dim-witted, recrudescently American films made by complete simpletons caused me to long for an earlier, innocent time before I became a film critic when I would never dream of ingesting such tripe. Back in those halcyon days of yore, I would while away the days gazing at legendary films crafted by such titans as Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Now I whiled away the days gazing at films starring Billy Zane. Whatever had happened to that wide-eyed youth, so full of brio, panache, joie de vivre, je ne sais quoi? How had he allowed himself to degenerate into a middle-aged philistine, hanging around half-empty theaters every afternoon watching jerry-rigged flapdoodle like Godzilla and Deep Impact? What had happened to that personal Golden Age when he only went to see films with tiny yellow subtitles where taciturn Scandinavians played chess with Death? How had he become so lowbrow, so crass?
Right then and there I made a crucial decision. After 10 years of writing about American movies for publications such as Movieline, I'd had it up to here with the repellent effluvia emanating from Hollywood like a bottomless Danube of Dung. From here on out, I was going to make a complete break with my previous moviegoing habits. I was only going to see foreign films, the kind of sensitive, intelligent, well-scripted, beautifully acted motion pictures that were all but extinct in Hollywood. I would only watch movies that spoke to the human heart. I would plight my troth to the search for the one, the true, and the beautiful, none of which I was likely to find in movies starring Joe Pesci. From this day onward, I was going first-class.
Things did not get off to such a great start. Although the advertisement assured me that Pavel Chukhrai's The Thief would steal my heart, the only thing The Thief stole was my money. A ponderous tale of woe set in Russia in 1952, when Joseph Stalin still ruled the roost, the film chronicles the misadventures of a young woman named Katya who falls in love with a charismatic professional thief named Tolyan. Because Katya desperately needs a husband and her adorable six-year-old boy Sanya desperately needs a father, she agrees to masquerade as the thief's wife, making it possible for them to obtain lodging in apartment houses he then pillages. The thief turns out to be a complete monster, not unlike Joseph Stalin, also a bit of a thief himself. In fact, just to make sure that no one misses the point of the film, Tolyan has a tattoo of Stalin emblazoned on his chest. It quickly becomes obvious that The Thief, which involves a good deal of smoking, starvation, subarctic weather, death, unnecessary accordion playing and peeing in one's pants, is an indictment of Stalin, the pitiless tyrant who broke his country's heart by stealing everything he could get his hands on. Well, that and killing millions of people.
Although I like unbelievably depressing movies set in rural Russia in 1952 as much as the next guy, I cannot pretend that The Thief was my shot of vodka. First, I'd already read that Stalin was a prick, so I didn't really need this film to drill it into me for two hours. And second, the acting was straight out of the Silent Film era. The Commie Silent Film Era. Sure, The Thief was a better film than Godzilla, in that it posed a large number of serious philosophical questions and didn't star Matthew Broderick, but all in all I can't actually say that I enjoyed it. It certainly was not in a class with the great foreign films I'd seen as a young man; it was slow, didactic and, well, grim. I sincerely hoped that my next outing would be more successful.
My next outing was actually less successful. Even though Zhang Yuan's East Palace West Palace is perhaps the finest movie ever made about the plight of sexually ambivalent mainland Chinese park police caught in the throes of a struggle to maintain civic order in an environment constantly being invaded by promiscuous young homosexuals, it still basically sucked. In it, a thirtysomething, ostensibly straight, park policeman working the mean streets of Beijing arrests a good-looking young homosexual for soliciting sex with strangers and then spends the entire night interrogating the gay perp about his sexual predilections. The cop, needless to say, is dressed in a black leather jacket, and, needless to say, the young detainee eventually confesses that one of his earliest sexual fantasies was spawned when his mother warned him: "Be good or the policeman will come and get you." Since that time, the young man has gone out of his way not to be good. Tonight could be the big payoff.
Much of what the young man has to say proves disgusting to the policeman. For instance, when he talks about being tortured by an older man who beat him with a belt and put out cigarettes on his chest, he notes: "It was unsettling, but rather pleasant." As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that the Hunan House of Love has many rooms and that this Pekinese party animal has been in all of them.
Since I had never before seen a film about the travails of sexually ambivalent mainland Chinese park police plagued by irksomely precocious young gays, I initially found the subject matter quite engrossing. But then when the cop forced his captive to get all dolled up like a hooker, complete with wig, high heels and lipstick, I felt that the movie was careening into the realm of the obvious. I felt the same way about the obligatory Oedipal flashback where the five-year-old boy is seen sucking his mother's breast. As the film ends, the cop realizes that he is probably gay, and very possibly the only gay Chinese park policeman on the mainland. Clearly, this could hurt his chances for promotion. He is last seen walking off into the distance, perhaps thinking: "If I'm going to stay in this line of work, I should probably think about moving to San Francisco." The director has probably had the same fleeting thought--the film was banned in China.
Because I was wrapped up in the consideration of whether this Chinese artifact was really any kind of cure for philistinism, it wasn't until a chunky man sat down right next to me in a nearly empty 200-seat theater that I realized this was the first time I'd ever attended a gay film. I had come to Manhattan's artsy Quad Cinema expecting to see a foreign film, which usually draws a lot of old men in Greek fishermen's hats and unattractive middle-aged women carrying PBS tote bags who sometimes have to leave early because they need to get home and feed their cats. But this crowd consisted entirely of gay men who had, I suspected, come here to see a gay, as opposed to a foreign, film. So when the guy sat down right next to me in a theater filled with rows upon rows of empty seats, the bulb finally lit up.
"I'm sorry," I explained politely. "I'm just a critic.
Discreetly, he moved away.
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.
Here I'd gone and told all my friends that I was through with gigaplex entertainment. That I'd had it up to here with the rank productions of Jerry Bruckheimer and Joel Silver. That I was going to limit my cinematic fare to exquisitely crafted, intensely moving foreign movies. Inadvertently, I had condemned myself to a steady diet of films about sexually repressed Chinese park cops and lovable yak herders.
The enormity of my error became clear to me when I queued up for a ticket to see Gadjo Dilo, the next film on my list. In this militantly charming motion picture, a young Frenchman attempts to assimilate himself into a Gypsy community in rural Romania. According to the San Francisco Chronicle blurb on the ad, the film was "Wonderful. A buoyant, raw look at Gypsy culture." That was enough to put the fear of God into me. I only needed to look at those stills outside the theater and study the colorfully attired Gypsy women dancing in unison while middle-aged men in natty fedoras sawed away on their ancient violins in the background to recognize that I couldn't walk another step down this particular road, that my pathetic little experiment was over. Sadly, I drifted away from the queue and made my way back home.
Though the newspapers were now trumpeting the merits of The Chambermaid on the Titanic, a thoughtful, heartwarming romance recently imported from Europe, I no longer had the stomach for heart-warming foreign romances. My spirit had been broken. It was time to admit my mistake. I bathed and shaved, then hauled myself off to a local theater, queued up in what proved to be a very short line, and meekly said, "One ticket for The Avengers." Then I went inside. As I'd expected, the film was atrocious. Ralph Fiennes was horrible. Sean Connery was ridiculous beyond belief. Uma Thurman was absent without leave. But the film was 100 percent yak-free, and the soundtrack did not sound like Jim Croce alchemically fused with the Gipsy Kings. Most important, Uma Thurman looked terrific in that catsuit. So I was happy to be back in the saddle. Some men look at a glass and say that it is half empty. Others say that it is half filled. That's exactly the way I look at things. Some men look at the current lineup of foreign films and say, "Viva Gadjo Dilo!" I look at the current lineup of foreign films and say, 'No mas." Pardon my French.
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Joe Queenan wrote about bad wigs for the September 98 issue of Movieline.