Faceless 1988

I started this year (and this blog) with a review of Jess Franco's Faceless. Now lets come full circle and re-review it. If 2017 taught me anything its that Franco was ahead of his time.

Faceless is still his masterpiece for me. Its extremely well-made but the script gives him the most substance to explore his established vocabulary. In the DVD commentary, he reveals that it was written by producer Rene Chateau for his aesthetic exactly. Chateau was a pure Franco fan so this obviously is the film for Franco fans. Franco is forced to stick to his better judgment and not lose sight of his audience with excessive sex or minimal plot. Its the commercial version of Franco's usual Dr. Orloff plot, but its so much stronger as Chateau organizes Franco's psychological obsessions and political leanings into something his haters can understand. Franco admitted that he didn't work with conscious meanings while shooting. But he read and contributed to Faceless and agreed that it is his story. He understood all of the symbolism, helped build its language and cosigned it as true to his vision. In commentary he even shoots down the claim that this is not a true Franco film.

All of that is preface for exploring the deep messages that make this the purest example of Franco's worldview. The script deconstructs his style exactly so the master can apply his aesthetic to where it belongs.

The plot of Faceless is based not on Orloff or the eerily similar French horror film Eyes Without A Face, but on the obscure novel that inspired both. Body snatchers are abducting and killing women to provide the flesh for a plastic surgeon's scarred sister. This thin premise is the groundwork for a Freudian labyrinth of psycho-sexual fracturing of the psyche.

The ultimate metaphor of the film is the Faceless Woman as the ultimate victim of capitalism's "sex sells" culture. Without a face, she has no identity, no love, no validation and cannot enter the world. Finding a new face = filling non-existence. No capital, no communism creates a violent search, a consuming passion for blood driving her to evil exploitation and fantasy fulfillment. Capitalism is built on the pain of the public for the privately wealthy. This is all from Eyes Without A Face, but the script takes some liberties. Prostitutes and Johns are shown as equal victims of the elite's hierarchy. Franco sees sex and drugs as instruments of the same hypocrisy, both independent occupations. Cocaine is how the film's damsel is seduced by our villains. This is the horror of a system where the working class aren't allowed to thrive but are demonized for using the only means they have. The horror of no communism is community goes to Hell where its "dog eat dog" and the artificial surface rules and spirituality is lost, sex is corrupted and cosmetic surgery is an enterprise.

Finding her New Face becomes the obsession of her plastic surgeon brother, the Ego - a cold Germanic genius, amoral, perverse and bourgeois in taste - a perfect example of Franco's villains. He is assisted by his cold blonde female nurse who represents Franco's feminine side - dangerous, anti-aging, anti-reproduction, a Lolita. The Id is represented by their manservant who is innocent, manipulated, confused but full of savage violence and obedient loyalty. They drag beautiful working class girls to their Parisian clinic to be diced up for old women to become beautiful again... until they abduct a rich daughter of a powerful elite man (the ultimate crime).

From the beginning, the Ego is torn between Sister and his nurse, the Other Woman. He is happy with both until an older woman whose beauty he damaged (representing The Mother) destroys his sister's face and ruins the balance of female energy in his psyche. With his beloved sister's life destroyed and the reality of aging clear, he is driven mad trying to resurrect his childhood memory of her. But the Other Woman become jealous of this incestuous obsession.  He is torn between two vampire females who drive him to seek blood and become a vampire himself. The female assistant symbolizes Lina Romay, the famous life partner of Jess. Her character is always that of a Frozen Image, a memory, a "dream girl" he cannot satisfy. Dream Girl turned Nightmare Girl. In a brief cameo, Lina appears as a photograph! One amazing sequence has the surgeon and nurse hunting a girl in a disco. The young woman rejects this aging man and his nurse uses false lesbian wiles to seduce the victim. Another great cinematic reflection of Franco and Lina's arrangement. Franco's women are often the slasher in his stories (Bloody Moon) Perhaps she was jealous of the grief Franco expressed for his original love and leading lady Soledad Miranda, who is represented by The Damsel the Ego keeps locked away.

The Damsel is in the mold of classic Franco girls. She is his version of The Virgin, but a coke-taking "daddy's girl" whore who sleeps with all races of men. Franco defends and praises her for this. The SuperEgo, a detective assigned by her Father, pursues her. He is flippant, bored, a hotshot Americanized tool of authority wunderkind destined to fall. This is the archetypal Franco male hero. Franco pokes fun at his younger self, the stifled commercial director who learned under Orson Welles but was barred from Hollywood success. At one point, Franco self-identifies with a stereotypically gay photographer of cokehead models, the best summary of his extremely castrated aesthetic fetishization of the female image in film. This gay Id combats the SuperEgo with a muscle man named "Doo Doo". Project what you will.

Franco belongs to that group of psychoanalytical directors including Hitchcock, Lynch, Maya Deren, DePalma, Fellini, Argento, Bunuel (call them the "Caligari Club") who use cinema as a dreamscape. They use so may of the same tropes like Blonde vs Brunette, Virgin or Whore, The Father-In-Law's Challenge, Familial sexual tension. Its about the sex NOT shown. Romantic Horror + Sexual Horror. The quest for hidden desire and the fear of exposed fetish. When the Ego's female slaves are discovered by a woman, the Id overreacts and tortures her. This mistake haunts him in the end and destroys him (finally stopped by spikes to the base of the brain by the SuperEgo).

Even with its luxurious surface and fantastic budget, the film is crude, abstract and obsessed with The Primal. I find the commercialism's contrast only raises the darkness and animal magnetism in Franco's style. Unable to use his own experimental jazz, Franco makes ironic use of pop songs to attack consumerism (notice in which scenes they play). Franco satirizes the style of other directors with a style purposely static. The uniqueness of scenes lies in the details and deviations, which he learned as a jazz musician. He is free from the storytelling and experimentation to have fun with each scene. He wants you to grade each individually on execution as he sprinkles weirdness in each scene but only extends himself when it counts. This film follows his hardcore porn days so it has a heavy softcore vibe that is soothing enough to be disarming. The gory scenes replace the "money shots".

In the end, this film is about the creation of a perfect Frankenstien woman: a beautiful stranger's face on one's defaced sister. The vampire Sister buys her new face - the final capitalist prize for jealousy, murder and illegal gain - becoming the ultimate kinky love object. Freud's nightmare. In maybe the greatest ending to a Franco film, the SuperEgo fails to save The Virginal "dream girl" because of her rich vacationing Father. The Father-in-Law's false hopes doom them. He kills his own daughter by raising her to be the cokeheaded sexual victim of capitalist vampires. Its slut-shaming, victim-blaming perhaps, but Franco still damns the "predators of the night" but puts the blame back on the corrupt authority father figure who lost control. It, like the work of David Lynch and Hitchcock, may be mistaken for rape apologizing, but these "meninist" Marxists were simply showing the intersectionality of sexual abuse and the abuse of power from the leaders of state and business. This is Franco's last smoldering attack on Generalismo Franco, the fascist dictator who defined the cynical worldview and radical politics of Spain and his own life path. In the end, maybe all of his work was psychologically about Replacing The Father. This was his struggle. He was left so damaged, so anti-mother, anti-reproduction, anti-children, anti-Nazi and thus anti-women he was naturally drawn to (blond women). He found solace in a sister fetish for darker, younger women. "Faceless" is a perverted biographical confession to this sexual damage.

Jess Franco is an artist who psychoanalyzes himself brutally with every personal film. With 100+ films made, he became more self-aware than almost anyone. He contextualized his beliefs and prejudices into his work effortlessly and could still make a deceptively commercial film. As bizarre, excessive, mad, drug-damaged or awkward as it might get, he owns his funny psyche because he knows it compares favorably to the collective man's.

Drowning by Numbers 1988

I followed the incredible experience of discovering Peter Greenaway's "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover" with his preceding feature and its perhaps greater.

It would take too long to unpack the complexities of the plot alone (and spoil the fun), so I will describe the experience. Here is a film that revels in its artificiality AND hyperrealism
m to create a world with a syntax of dreams and a hard to summarize texture of reality. Sounds like empty word salad, but this film works on many planes. Greenway comes from painting as David Lynch does, but from the Baroque end. He doesn't bog you down in intellect-insulting fine artist jargon. He only wants to make you think between the plot turns and pretty camera shots. So much of the film unravels as a mystery but becomes crystal clear only in memory. He's giving you the sensation of studying a wide body of different work and calling attention to the field itself, the sum of its parts. Thats so hard to do and very rare to find in British "art films".

Because we are getting an authentic look at a local mindset, exploring the fringe thoughts of a society that has isolated its artists, thinkers and misfits. These characters represent the core of the unseen world by their madness from it. So little character is explained but they all ring true and familiar. These are the unique personas that we meet when we leave the masses. We love them but we're also afraid of and for them. In the end, they are all victims of a gray morality and they have a random gray way of policing it. Its unfair and cruel, but we come across this kind of brutal violence everyday. How Greenaway captured this abstract sense is astounding.

Its the blackest of black comedy and the most human of tragedies. I feel the story is universal thanks to its stripped down ingredients and its immersion in nature and timeless artifacts. Its so clearly from 1988 but if someone told me it was from 1968 or 2018, I'd buy it. This film is a dream. You forget its details but the message sticks.

 

*I rewatched this special film and found more to appreciate. I still won't spoil the events of the plot in any way, but the influences are clearer to me and the themes resonate even more.

The overwhelming production, how it turns English hillside into an elaborate, living theatrical stage, integrates every element for the simple function of progression in numbers, progression period. I assume Greenaway was toying with the theatrical aesthetic of Gesamkuntwerk to set up his rejection of it in "The Cook, The Thief...", which is a pure work of Brectian "separation of the elements".

Greenaway must be a big fan of Bertolt Brecht (who I'm researching currently) as this film ascribes to his ideal of Epic "Dialectic" Theatre. We feel so removed from the action, which is never too realistic nor too surreal. This film is firmly moving towards full-on Epic theatre, but it has much more Naturalism than Greenaway's following films. It has an intricate, if small plot and doesn't veer too Romantic. I assume it was an experiment to merge these polar ideas of theatre and see which works better. Is it integrated successfully or does it work best deconstructed into material pieces? 

Figure that Greenaway toyed with these aesthetic games while also rendering an ambitious study of the male horror of matriarchy in radical bluntness. Is it a feminist battle cry? A warning to patriarchy? Both? Or just a dark satire of the battle of the sexes?

**I have to add a 3rd section because this film has haunted me all year and I find new layers to meditate with. I think the central metaphors and title refer to the unique passive violence of women. The only way they can fight back is to slowly kill you. They lie, seduce, plot and frame men out of some gender-based structuralism society has left them in reaction to patriarchy. The male victims of the film never wrong the women in any fatal way, but they trigger that omnipresent Father Complex in all women. This is such a bold, ruthless and honest examination of the female problem of sex & violence. How is this film not more heralded?

Funny Farm 1988

ChevyChase tried his hand at producing with the very underrated screwball comedy "Funny Farm". Its not the best Chase vehicle but maybe his most personal. It operates at his leisurely pace and is full of the romance, slapstick, cleverness and scenic beauty that is found in his best roles (Caddyshack, Vacation). Chase was a tremendous talent who needed particulars to do his best work. The producer's role had to make things much easier for him as an actor as he picked his director, writer and co-stars. But I can't decide if Funny Farm is an almost-classic or a true hidden gem.

Its certainly better than the great but uneven films Nothing But Trouble and Spies Like Us, but does it compare to Fletch or at least Fletch Lives? I prefer it to those actually. Chase is typecast as a lazy, snarky wiseass with a hard-on and lots of dated 80s dad coolness and, while he's excellent at it, I don't know if that was what Chase ever intended. Funny Farm shows Chase in a more realistic, Everyman role. He's very imperfect but never a buffoon or a prick. With a scaled back character, Chase's charm is more warm and his very muted emotionalism is very endearing. This may be his most fleshed out character. He played darker and more sympathetic characters, but this feels like someone you can more easily root for.

Its a simple premise: Chase and his wife (played by the gorgeous and quite subtle Madolyn Smith) move from the city to the country and things don't go as planned. Chase's fans probably expected a really juvenile movie and Chase gives them a few treats, but this is much closer to the sentimentality and family-friendliness of Christmas Vacation than his other films. Totally in-step with the John Hughes comedies of the period, but more sophisticated and less trendy which allows the film to hold up better. The film is full of great character actors and Madolyn Smith is one of the actresses you wish had a bigger career before stepping away from acting. Statuesque and as deadpan as Chevy, he never had a better companion in his romantic roles.

There isn't much more to say as its a fairly soft plot (but not dumb or loose) and it all sails on the execution of the perfectly assembled production. A few laughs could've been bigger than they are and maybe you will miss Chase's one-liners and little boy antics, but I think it stands on its own as a great moment in his career. It helps contextualize Chevy Chase as the Will Ferrell of his day, the coolest SNL hero of his day turned Hollywood leading man who is best remembered for zany sophomoric comedies and some warm-hearted family flicks but had a riskier side that made the occasional mature satire for his artsier fans.