for this week’s TRIBUNE : ‘Bad Lieutenant’ (Herzog) [8/10]; ‘Paradise’ [5/10]; IndieLisboa report

Published on: May 20th, 2010

Bad Lieutenant — Director: Werner Herzog
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Paradise — Director: Michael Almereyda
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Two years ago, the enigmatic Seattle-based critic known only as ‘Vern’ (and who, with a style somewhere between Pauline Kael and Charles Bukowski, is perhaps the world’s most entertaining and original film critic right now) finally got around to reviewing Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992). Wrapping up his comments on the film – which follows a New York cop played by Harvey Keitel wading through a self-created swamp of bad debts, bad faith, bad language and bad behaviour – he speculated, in his characteristic tangential fashion, that “maybe some kids somewhere grew up loving it and did their own remake.”
   Well, here is a remake – in theory – of Bad Lieutenant. But rather than passionately devoted “kids”, the director is, of all people, 67-year-old Werner Herzog, the Bavarian for whom the description “maverick auteur” might well have been invented. His relationship with the 1992 movie is non-existent (“I haven’t seen it, so I can’t compare it”), his knowledge of Ferrara similarly limited (“I’ve never seen a film by him. I have no idea who he is.”) Then again, as Herzog has also stated, his movie “has nothing to do with” Ferrara’s picture – sharing only the title and the basic idea of a misbehaving police officer in a major American city.
   Speaking of the title, it’s a bit disappointing that the movie’s UK distributors have seen fit to present it just as Bad Lieutenant - thus emphasising (non-existent) links with the Ferrara predecessor, rather than the full version favoured by Herzog, namely The Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans, a moniker which is as daft and convoluted as the movie itself. Taking Ferrara’s template to even further extremes, Herzog has crafted an utterly berserk policier starring an unbridled Nicolas Cage as Terence McDonagh, a corrupt, backache-plagued, drug-addicted lawman in an atmospheric, semi-flooded city still recovering from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina.
   Cage’s prolific work-rate over the past few years is reportedly due a colossal tax demand – he’s had to sell a German castle which he owned (as you do), and was recently seen switching the Christmas lights on in Bath (ditto), which happens to be close to another of his residences. But his semi-accidental collaboration with Herzog – responsible for such classics as Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Heart of Glass (1976), Fitzcarraldo (1982), Nosferatu (1979) and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), among many others – represents cine-serendipity of the very highest order.
   Herzog has enjoyed a welcome career-revival over the past couple of years, with the likes of Grizzly Man (2005), Rescue Dawn (2006) and the Oscar-nominated documentary Encounters at the End of the World (2007). This brought the long-time Los Angeles resident to the attention of some adventurous producers, and thus he was signed up to bring scriptwriter William M Finkelstein’s Bad Lieutenant remake to the screen.
   The result is something entirely rich and strange, and which works on multiple levels. It is entirely possible to regard the picture – which co-stars Val Kilmer, rapper Xzibit (who’s surprisingly good) and Eva Mendes – as a pretty “straight” (as in straight-to-video) thriller with weird trimmings. But it will no doubt strike many viewers, especially those familiar with the more extreme crannies of Cage and Herzog’s filmographies, as an utterly hilarious deconstruction (from within) of its own genre, punctuated with bizarre visions and behaviour which lift Bad Lieutenant into the realm of the genuinely satirical and subversive in its depiction of contemporary American “success.”
   And Cage’s isn’t even, strictly speaking, the oddest performance in the film – that honour goes to Shea Whigham as cocky, ever-so-smooth-talking no-goodnik Justin (breathy catch-phrase “ohh yeahhhh”), whose handful of scenes with McDonagh recall the legendary ham-vs-ham squareoffs between Dennis Hopper and Crispin Glover in River’s Edge.
   Just as the Lt McDonagh sees his cop-badge as a license to disobey society’s conventions, Herzog likewise uses the anti-hero’s drug intake – some of it medicinal, most of it recreational – as an excuse to go down all manner of unexpected avenues, in terms of tone, visuals, plot and characterisation. Both risk disaster at numerous junctures; both somehow extract a kind of glory from potential career-ending catastrophe.
   Cage, of course, is on a roll following Kick-Ass; Herzog has already completed his follow-up, the David Lynch produced My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (see IndieLisboa report below). The latter is an even more astonishing minor-masterpiece of disorientation and subversion which, despite the eyecatching talent involved on both sides of the camera (it features a quartet of Oscar nominees in Willem Dafoe, Brad Dourif, Chloe Sevigny and Revolutionary Road ‘s superb Michael Shannon) has – disgracefully, but unsurprisingly given the current state of things – yet to secure UK distribution. 

The vagaries of the distribution system are again illustrated by the surprising presence on our (arthouse) screens of Paradise, a noodlingly inconsequential compilation of home-video material shot by Michael Almereyda on his travels around the world over the last couple of decades. Almereyda’s stock was at its highest around a decade ago, when his modern-day adaptation Hamlet (2000) – starring Ethan Hawke – was a modest “indie” hit.
   Also responsible for 1994′s modish vampire picture Nadja, Almereyda has never quite “broken through” in the manner of a Gus Van Sant or a Richard Linklater, and Paradise seems most unlikely to change that state of affairs. Edited by Laurie Butler and Bara Jichova, it’s a choppy affair which very occasionally delivers moments of beauty and epiphany – the best but is probably right at the very end, an eerie trip on what looks like the Maid of the Mist into Niagara Falls – but elsewhere feels like a project that’s been semi-randomly cobbled together in the optimistic hope that “magic” will somehow arise alchemically from mundanity. 

IN PRAISE OF SWEET SIXTEEN
a report from the Lisbon film festival, IndieLisboa
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A DISPATCH this week from the western edge of Europe – Portugal’s capital of Lisbon, to be precise, where the 7th IndieLisboa took place from 22nd April to the 2nd of May. I must desist from any general commentary on the festival’s quality, as I’m not an unbiased observer: though I have no formal role as such, I provide programming suggestions to the organisers, and do introductions and Q&As when directors are present (the festival covers my transport and accommodation expenses). I therefore restrict myself to commentary on new films which I had no hand in programming, and which are worth keeping an eye out for at upcoming UK festivals, or even via distribution at your local arthouse.
   One movie which on paper looks a natural for such exposure is Werner Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done – which I mention elsewhere on these pages in conjunction with the director’s Bad Lieutenant non-remake (see above.) A genuinely disturbing – but also at times genuinely hilarious – exploration of suburban dysfunction and criminal insanity, it stars the man who’s arguably American cinema’s most compelling performer right now: Michael Shannon.
   Oscar-nominated for his spectacular supporting turn as the uncomfortable-truth-spouting neighbour in Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road, Shannon is front-and-centre here as a tormented, mother-obsessed amateur actor, a volatile chap tipped over the edge by the combination of a spiritual vacation in Peru and being cast as the matricidal protagonist in a Greek tragedy. The resulting murder is the true-story-inspired launch-pad for a typically Herzog-ian exploration of human nature in an absurd, hostile universe – with a terrific cast including Chloe Sevigny, Udo Kier, Willem Dafoe and David Lynch regular Grace Zabriskie.
   Lynch is also credited as a producer on My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (absence of question-mark in the title is evidently intentional) and his “vibe” is evident in numerous scenes – Herzog playfully tipping his hat to a fellow-traveller in the darker corridors of cinematic psychology. Though perhaps too cock-eyed for some, My Son My Son is a pungent and distinctive work that’s at least as good as anything Herzog (or Lynch) has come up with in the past decade.
   Looking through my other Lisbon standouts, I’m startled to note that the quartet all share two specific features in common: all were shot on 16mm (transferred to 35mm prints for projection), and all were collaborations involving pairs of directors.
   Proof once again that the best things come in the smallest packages, A History of Mutual Respect is a 23-minute short – written and directed by Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt. Portuguese but born and educated in the US, Abrantes (pronounced “Abransh”) was also responsible for the one of the finest shorts from last year’s IndieLisboa, the flamboyantly transgressive and taboo-busting Visionary Iraq.
   And Mutual Respect - in which a pair of spoiled Americans flaunt their decadent colonial attitudes on a tour of South American beauty-spots – confirms his singular talents. He’s able to create a world of his own with image, sound and language – the opening, featuring the Iguazu Falls and the voice of Nina Simone, is among the most sublime sequences in recent cinema. Still only 26, can surely be counted among Portugal’s – and Europe’s – most exciting younger prospects, and news that he’s working on his first feature-length work is cause for optimistic anticipation indeed.
   Speaking of scarily precocious film-makers in their mid-20s – keep an eye out for New York’s Safdie brothers, Josh (26) and Benny (24). Their debut feature as joint writer-directors won top prize in Lisbon’s main competition section (restricted to first- and second-time directors): Go Get Some Rosemary, recently released in the US under the title Daddy Longlegs.
    Shot on Super 16mm stock – a semi-pro format that gives proceedings a bygone, atmospheric, agreeably low-tech feel – it follows a Manhattan film-projectionist’s chaotic struggles to cope with the responsibilities of looking after his two young children for a fortnight (the rest of the year they live with their mother). A little Woody Allen, a little Curb Your Enthusiasm, it’s a pleasingly audacious character-study of a fundamentally dislikeable, solipsistic individual – played with strangely quirky magnetism by Ronny Bronstein (a writer-director of some note himself, responsible for 2007′s even more abrasive Frownland.)
   Audiences in search of conventionally approachable characters with whom they can identify and sympathise would have been even more stymied by the film that was perhaps the critical favourite of the festival, the uncompromising Croatian war-movie The Blacks, written and directed by Goran Dević and Zvonimir Jurić (both born in 1971). Quietly picking up awards around the film-festival circuit over the past few months, it examines a specialist unit during the last hours of hostilities with Serbia – a time when the group’s deeds during the conflict are exacting a toll of guilt upon certain of its members.
   Bleak and claustrophobically grim, the use of 16mm stock to shoot in the main locations – an abandoned school; a rain-sodden minefield – resulting in a picture that has the lo-fi feel of an early-80s horror movie. And though the storytelling is at times a little too opaque for its own good (at 78 minutes, this is that rare example of a film which could easily have been a reel or two longer) a second viewing was enough for me to fill in most of the gaps and appreciate Dević and Jurić’s skills with dialogue, mood and control of a tight ensemble.
   Can it be a coincidence “archaic” formats like 16mm – outdated in terms of the hyper-advanced technology that’s becoming the norm for Hollywood productions – should prove such an attraction for younger film-makers, especially with so many of their peers resorting to cheap-and-cheerful digital cameras?
   No such gadgetry for Portugal’s Marco Martins (b.1972) and André Príncipe (b.1976) – they deployed a pair of 16mm Krasnogorsk-3 wind-up cameras for their beautiful black-and-white documentary Traces of a Diary: part travelogue of contemporary Japan (mainly Tokyo), part portrait of six contemporary Japanese photographers, including superstars of the genre like Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki. A world-premiere at IndieLisboa, the film looks set for a successful run in documentary festivals around the globe – but is sufficiently distinctive and original to stand as an art-work in its own right, as well as an introduction to a fascinating branch of contemporary culture.
  
Neil Young
11th May, 2010
written for the 19th May edition of Tribune magazine

BAD LIEUTENANT : [8/10] : {aka The Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans} : USA 2009 : Werner HERZOG : 122m (BBFC) : seen at Kino Vič, Ljubljana – 18th November 2009 – LIFFe / Ljubljana International Film Festival (complimentary ticket) : {21/28}
    ….. original festival-report
PARADISE : [5/10] : USA 2009 : Michael ALMEREYDA : 82m (ICA) : seen at National Media Museum, Bradford – 26th March 2010 – Bradford International Film Festival (complimentary ticket) : {13/20}
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seen at IndieLisboa, Lisbon (all via complimentary tickets; timings from festival-catalogue):
THE BLACKS : [7/10] : Crnci : Croatia 2009 : Goran DEVIC & Zvonimir JURIC : 78m : seen at Londres cinema on 28th and 30th April : {19/28}
GO GET SOME ROSEMARY : [7/10] : aka Daddy Longlegs : USA 2009 : Benny & Josh SAFDIE : 100m : seen at Londres cinema, 30th April : {19/28}
A History of Mutual Respect : [****/5] : Portugal 2010 : Gabriel ABRANTES & Daniel SCHMIDT : 23m : seen on DVD in Culturgest : {11/13}
MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE : [8/10] : USA(/Ger) 2009 : Werner HERZOG : 93m : seen at São Jorge cinema on 1st May : {22/28}
TRACES OF A DIARY : [7/10] : Fragmentos de um Diário : Portugal 2010 : Marco MARTINS & André PRINCIPE : 90m : seen at Culturgest on 28th April : {20/28}

also
The All-Around Reduced Personality : ReduPers (Sander 1977) 7/10 {20/28}
Belair (Safadi 2010) 5/10 {12/28}
Castro (Moguillansky 2009) 4/10 {10/28}
Incident by a Bank (Ostlund 2009) ***/5 {8/13} short
It’s Already Summer (Smits 2010) 6/10 {17/28}
Make It New John (Campbell 2009) 6/10 {17/28} mid-length
Nothing Personal (Antoniak 2009) W/O
Putty Hill (Porterfield 2010) 5+/10 {14+/28}
The Robber (Heisenberg 2010) 6/10 {16/28}
So Is This (Snow 1982) 6/10 {16/28} mid-length