The Sweet Hereafter

Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter is a bleak, melancholy film focused on a small, wintry mountain community where a school bus accident takes the lives of many of the town's children. It is a harrowing subject, a nightmare scenario that tears apart the lives of this town's families, of those left behind in its aftermath. And yet Egoyan's film does not truly do justice to this grief, does not truly develop this tragedy into something as deep or as powerful as it deserves. It is a tasteful, quiet treatment of tragedy, a film with many moments of devastating beauty, a film with an eye for telling details and small but suggestive moments. But, ultimately, it stays too close to the surface, gliding along superficially above the tragedy and the people it touches rather than trying to delve into their lives, their emotions, their characters. It is tragedy abstracted, nakedly hitting all the right tear-jerking buttons but only occasionally getting beyond such manipulations to a deeper core of human feeling.

Egoyan weaves together multiple time periods, blending the accident, the events leading up to it, and its aftermath, cutting between the time periods to explore the differences opened up when a school bus loaded with children slid off an icy road into a frozen lake, killing nearly everyone on board. Of the children, only Nicole (Sarah Polley) survives, albeit in a wheelchair, with no real memory of what had happened. The only other survivor is the driver, Dolores (Gabrielle Rose), a woman who had loved her job, who loved these children, and who, heartbreakingly, continues to refer to them in the present tense, as though they were all still alive. After the accident, a lawyer, Mitchell Stevens (Ian Holm), comes to town hoping to capitalize on these families' grief, insisting that what had seemed a simple and unavoidable accident was actually the result of someone's malfeasance: a flimsy guard rail, a badly maintained bus, cost-cutting measures at some school board or company. He convinces many of the families to join his suit, except for Billy (Bruce Greenwood), who's mourning his beloved twin children, and the wife he'd previously lost to cancer, but who refuses to take the easy way out and blame anyone for his grief.

The film introduces many characters as Stevens visits the town's grieving parents and recruits them into his lawsuit, but Egoyan hardly delves too deeply into anything. There are numerous subplots that percolate on the fringes of the film but never go anywhere. Bill was having an affair with Risa (Alberta Watson), whose husband is introduced in the opening scenes as a nasty redneck caricature, delivering painfully contrived dialogue meant to demonstrate, in bold-face and underlined type, that this formerly tight-knit town is going to be torn apart by the arrival of the exploitative lawyer. It's all so trite, so inorganic, as this jerk insults his neighbors and friends one by one, until Egoyan is sure that he's made his point. The script is filled with overwritten contrivances like this, moments when it becomes all too obvious that the film is going to be making its big point now; there's no subtlety, no attempt to develop such ideas organically through patient character development. There's hardly any character development at all, in fact, just a series of types. The incest subplot between Nicole and her father Sam (Tom McCamus) is similarly undeveloped and disconnected from everything else.


Although the film suffers from this lack of depth and subtlety, there's no doubt that Egoyan has an eye for compelling details and an ability to stage striking, even haunting images. There's something chilling about the scene of Nicole walking into a deserted barn with her father for what seems to be a romantic evening. Before she enters, she pauses outside, wrapped in a red shawl like Little Red Riding Hood — Egoyan continually connects her to fairy tales, both in her narration of the Pied Piper story as an allegory for the children's deaths and in her sad acknowledgment that, post-accident, she's no longer daddy's little princess. Moments like this linger in the imagination, and when Egoyan is able to touch upon such emotionally resonant moments, it's compelling, even if in the larger narrative the incest subplot is so undeveloped that it barely registers. (And even though the actual staging of the subsequent incest scene as a candlelit romantic moment is cringe-inducing.)

When Egoyan delves deeper into emotional territory, he comes away with stunning material, like Stevens' surprisingly touching account of how he'd once brought his daughter to the hospital for a life-threatening spider bite when she was a very young child. Egoyan hones in on a single moment, a single image: a closeup of the girl's expressionless face, cradled in her father's arms as he drives, with an open switchblade next to her face, her father's hand poised to perform a tracheotomy if her throat should close and her breathing choke off. It's a startling, emotionally fraught image, this juxtaposition of the child's innocent face and the hovering danger of the knife, a visual indication of this father's willingness to do anything to save his child.

Such moments are so emotionally rich, so suggestive of the depths of these characters, that one wishes Egoyan was able to cut so deeply all the time, that he was able to bring the same heft to the film as a whole. Unfortunately, too much of the film is shallow and mannered, and too many of the other characters seem to have no such depths to plumb. It's too often an approximation of grief rather than the real thing, a manipulative film that leans too hard on its central tragedy, relying on the horror of children dying to disguise the fact that Egoyan has little else to offer. Its supposed insights — small towns hide secrets, neighbors can easily turn on each other, lawyers are corrupt — are so shockingly obvious and time-worn that it's hard to believe Egoyan thinks he's revealing anything about the nature of grief or incest or parent/child relationships here. And at least one of its points, the idea that tragedy is often exploited, is merely ironic in light of the film's over-reliance on the tear-jerking aspects of its story. The Sweet Hereafter has moments of sad beauty, moments where some human spark shines through the contrivances of the script, but these moments are all too often overwhelmed by Egoyan's lite-tragic sensibility and the overstated simplicities that stand in for themes.

Films I Love #24: Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988)

Much of David Cronenberg's career has been devoted to fearlessly excavating the strangest, most unsettling corners of human psychology and sexuality, expressing primal emotions through the grotesque "body horror" for which the director was, until recently, best known. In many ways, though Dead Ringers is one of Cronenberg's tamest 80s films in terms of its visceral imagery (admittedly, "tame" is a very relative word here), it's possibly his most disturbing inquiry into the lower reaches of human consciousness. It's the story of twin gynecologists Elliot and Beverly Mantle (both played, via special effects, by Jeremy Irons) who are so close that their identities are intertwined. Indeed, they take advantage of their identical appearance to swap places with one another at will, taking turns giving public appearances, performing surgeries and research, and even switching off with the women they date. The arrogant, confident Elliot and the shy, sweet Bev are two sides of the same personality, complementing and completing one another, together forming a whole person; neither of them could really exist independently.

Nevertheless, Bev decides that he wants to try severing this intimate bond between the brothers when he falls in love with the movie star Claire (Geneviève Bujold), who starts out as just another of the brothers' mutual conquests. As usual, the more confident Elliot seduces and sleeps with her, then allows Bev to take his place the next night. But when Beverly's bond with the needy, masochistic Claire begins to threaten the connection between the brothers, things start falling apart for all three of them. The film is a nightmarish study of psychological dependency, of unhealthy bonds between people — symbolized by the horrifying dream in which Bev envisions himself and his brother joined together by a meaty umbilical cord, which Claire tries to bite through. The film certainly doesn't lack Cronenberg's signature disturbing imagery, but for the most part its "body horror" is more psychological and internal rather than being inscribed in blood and gore. When Bev, driven mad by isolation and grief, simply unveils his set of tools for operating on "mutant women," it's a visceral chill on par with any of Cronenberg's more grisly set pieces. By locating the film's horror almost entirely in the minds and personae of these twins, Dead Ringers becomes one of Cronenberg's finest, most creepily incisive works.

Crimes of the Future

Crimes of the Future is, like its predecessor Stereo, an early example of director David Cronenberg's eccentric vision. Made as student films on extremely small budgets, both films betray their economical origins at every point. Unlike Stereo, Crimes is in color rather than black and white, but it shares the earlier film's minimalist aesthetic. Shot silent, the soundtrack consists entirely of a measured, stilted voiceover which appears only at intervals to tell the film's story, interspersed with noisy, crackling industrial soundscapes. The film is abstracted, its narrative willfully obtuse and elliptical. It is set in an unsettling future world in which a mysterious and incurable plague has wiped out most of the adult women, and now seems to be spreading to the men as well. The plague is, as bodily transformations and deformations so often are for Cronenberg, both disturbing and fascinating for its victims: the patients emit strange white (semen-like) foam from their orifices and bleed thick black fluid from their eyes and mouths. These discharges are, for some strange reason, almost irresistibly attractive; anyone who comes across these fluids is seized with an urge to touch them, to smear them across their hands, and to taste them, sensually licking the disease's syrupy discharges from their fingers.

It's apparent that Cronenberg's signature obsessions are almost completely intact even in this early student effort: his conflation of the gross and the sublime; his treatment of abnormal sexuality as both frightening and hypnotically erotic; his fascination with the creation of new worlds, new ways of living, through biological transformations. The world of this film is truly an alien world, a fact that Cronenberg communicates through the strange, slow-moving quality of the narrative, as well as the surreal, nonsensical actions that his characters perform, often with a ritualistic air that only increases further the feeling of something being, somehow, off. The story ostensibly centers around a certain Adrian Tripod (the gaunt, ghostly pale Ronald Mlodzik), a researcher of some kind who wanders from one obscure job to another: the head of a strange dermatological facility called the House of Skin; an observer at an STD clinic where a man has been infected with a disease that causes him to sprout countless bizarre, functionally useless new internal organs, a phenomenon his doctors have deemed a "creative cancer;" a courier whose sole function seems to be ferrying clear plastic bags of socks and underwear back and forth between silent men who solemnly arrange the garments into piles based on obscure criteria.

Tripod, who delivers the film's oddly hesitant voiceover, is less a proper character than a focal point for the weirdness of Cronenberg's images. There's no explanation for the narrator's sudden switches of jobs, nor his decision to fall in with a group of "subversive" pedophiles in the film's final act. It's telling that over the course of the film, his narration changes from the first person to the third person; by the end, he's referring to himself by his full name every time he speaks. Despite his severe appearance, with his pale eggplant-shaped head hovering above his all-black outfits, Tripod's interactions with the many people he meets tend to be sensual, bizarrely erotic. While serving as some kind of foot therapist, Tripod treats a young man who leers at the researcher while Tripod strips off the man's boot and sock and begins caressing and massaging his foot, finally pressing it against his forehead and beginning to vibrate as though electrified. Cronenberg shoots this scene like a homosexual seduction, with the young man reclining back, a knowing smile on his lips, his legs slightly spread, with Tripod kneeling between the other man's outstretched feet.


There's something unsettling about the way Cronenberg deploys gay and feminine iconography here, as markers of strangeness: the recurring image of brightly painted toe- and fingernails, the sensuous embraces between men in a world mostly devoid of women, the way Tripod kisses the cheeks of a dead patient in order to drink up the dried blood that poured out of the corpse's mouth. The film's vision of sexuality is immensely disturbing, and never more so than in the final scenes, when Tripod and his new pedophile allies kidnap a prepubescent girl. Tripod's voiceover calmly discusses the necessity of trying to "impregnate" this girl, who's treated as a test subject, and the scene where Tripod begins stripping while the girl watches, coloring pictures on the floor, is unbelievably creepy and queasy. Cronenberg is walking a tight rope here, verging on exploitation, especially when he cuts to reverse shot closeups of the girl in frankly seductive poses, her fingers twirling through her hair. There's just something icky about the whole thing, something more disturbed than disturbing. One watches a scene like this and is unsettled more by the implications for what went on during filming than by what might happen in the fictional scenario. The scene inevitably triggers unpleasant thoughts of Cronenberg directing this girl to pose in these ways, arranging her gestures and posture to suggest things she couldn't possibly understand herself; it's exploitative and more than a little uncomfortable to watch, in ways entirely different from the discomfort so often generated by Cronenberg's later work.

Even if one ignores, for the moment, the ethical implications of these scenes, Crimes of the Future can't really be called a successful film. It's sporadically interesting for its glimpse into Cronenberg's developing themes and ideas, but it's also often dull and soporific. The film is characterized by long, meandering, near-silent scenes that are often never explained, never developed into a part of a coherent story. There's a dream logic to the film's narrative structure, which switches without warning from one mostly self-contained vignette to the next, and this can be effective at times, producing the odd, hallucinatory quality of the film's most striking images and moments. More often, though, there are long stretches of utter boredom, like the seemingly endless scenes of sock-folding and sorting. The film is undeniably intriguing, and is clearly the foundation for Cronenberg's later work, a laboratory in which he could experiment and develop his unique cinematic obsessions. As a whole, though, it's a flawed and disturbing work best seen as a curiosity of the director's early career.

Eastern Promises/Pursued

Eastern Promises is David Cronenberg's very conscious follow-up to his previous film, A History of Violence, which also starred Viggo Mortensen, and which also represented the idiosyncratic director's engagement with mainstream conceptions of genre and violence. Both films place Mortensen dead-center in a gritty, violent action plot, and both films are undeniably much more straightforward and polished than the wild horror and sci-fi films that earned Cronenberg his reputation. But if History was a typical man-with-a-past thriller, adorned with only traces of Cronenberg's style and depth, tacked on like so much set decoration, Eastern Promises is something entirely different, a grand accomplishment that builds on and improves its predecessor in every way. Cronenberg has effectively reversed the formula — instead of sneaking in elements of his style into a formulaic thriller, here he makes only token nods towards the purported narrative. This is a deeply strange film that only pretends to be a gangster flick, when it's patently obvious that so much more is going on.

Mortensen is typically smoldering and intense as Nikolai, the right-hand man for Kirill (Vincent Cassel), a drunken lout who is nevertheless a key figure in London's Russian mob because of his father Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). The film's drama and action surround this trio of gangsters and hitmen, but the heart of the story lies elsewhere, with a young baby who's delivered at the beginning of the film by an obstetrician, Anna (Naomi Watts). Cronenberg signals the film's essential concerns early on, when he has the two opening scenes encompass both birth and death, and in equally gory detail. In the first scene, a barber (who doubles as a mob hitman) forces his retarded son to kill a customer, with a slit-throat blood geyser worthy of Sweeney Todd. Cronenberg follows this with the birth, which is if anything even more disturbing in its focus on viscera and blood, as the baby takes its first hesitant breaths while her mother dies on the operating table. These two scenes initially seem unrelated, but they turn out to be connected to the same underground world of Russian mafia, prostitutes, and killers. Through her determination to find out about the baby's origins and the whereabouts of its relatives, Anna is thrust into this world, as well as perversely drawn to it.

But Anna is, despite her narrative importance, something of a sideline character here. Her charater is important insofar as she represents the outsider, the audience surrogate exploring an unfamiliar world, but despite Watts' top billing she is not a main character. This is a distinctly male film, because it's a very male genre that Cronenberg is tackling here, and the violence at the film's core is not only masculine, but an expression of masculine sexuality. The links between this violence and male sexuality are underscored again and again within the film, as is the ambiguous link between Nikolai and Kirill. The latter clearly idolizes his supposed underling, and there's a real current of homosexual desire in this worship. This desire finds expression in Kirill's continued attempts to dominate and subjugate Nikolai, as in the scene where he forces Nikolai to have sex with an underage prostitute at his father's whorehouse, he says so that Nikolai can prove that he's not a "queer." But the way Kirill watches this joyless, violent sex, and the way he praises Nikolai's performance afterwards, only proves that Kirill is the one who's queer, an assumption that's borne out in the many gestures of friendship and joking camaraderie that pass between the two men, gestures that are constantly threatening to transform into caresses or even embraces. When Nikolai is finally accepted as a full member of the mob and marked for initiation, they do embrace, and the framing and posing seems to be setting them up for a sweepingly romantic Hollywood kiss — a formulation that's mocked in the denouement when Nikolai and Anna briefly fall into the same pose, adopting a more conventional movie combination (father, mother, baby) only to emphasize just how much this film rejects such pat familial dynamics.

If violence and sexuality are intertwined in the relationship of Nikolai and Kirill and the linkage of new life with murder and death, this theme comes to its head in the film's climax, already justifiably famous for the scene where Viggo Mortensen conducts an entire, very bloody fight completely in the nude. This bathhouse slaughter is the film's undeniable centerpiece, and it's here that Cronenberg completely lets any pretext of a conventional genre thriller fall away along with Mortensen's clothes. In the course of this masterfully choreographed sequence, a great deal of blood is spilled, and yet Cronenberg emphasizes the sexualization of his star, the way his body bends and contorts, the sexual poses he falls into in the midst of this brutal struggle. It's a truly harrowing and potent sequence, evincing Cronenberg's characteristic interest in the body and the changes wrought on it by violence and sexuality. This interest in the body also extends to the film's recurring motif of tattoos, which are markers of identity — when Nikolai pledges his loyalty to the mob, he must denounce his family and his past, and be tattooed with the markings of the gang — as well as guides to an individual's life and history. The body can be "read" through these tattoos, and the bearer's persona can be inferred from the story told by these symbols. Bodies can be read, especially dead ones, and all the film's corpses have messages to pass on. The girl who dies giving birth in the opening propels the film forward with her diary, excerpts of which are read in voiceover, commenting obliquely on the action, periodically throughout the film.

Likewise, the story of Cronenberg's film — the real, underlying story lightly disguised by its genre trappings — can be read from the abundant symbols he employs. It's a story of the traditional family undermined by both homosexual desire and explosive violence — a brief that sounds surprisingly conservative on paper, except that Cronenberg clearly takes such gleeful pleasure in disrupting the placid surfaces of Hollywood conventionality that it's hard to take the film as anything but a radical critique of the normative structures it sometimes apes. Unlike A History of Violence, where Cronenberg seemed to disappear too readily into the conventional surfaces of the genre narrative, Eastern Promises is a prickly, genuinely disturbing and potent film that may indicate a fresh new development in Cronenberg's oeuvre. Certainly, it's his most perverse and exciting film since the delirious high point of 1997's Crash, and that alone is reason enough to celebrate this return to form.

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Raoul Walsh's Pursued is a lurid, frankly ludicrous Western that infuses a noir sensibility into the oater genre. Sometimes, the combination is awkward and unevenly realized, but it's always intriguing, and the concept (with the help of leads Robert Mitchum and Teresa Wright) generates enough sparks to keep the film engaging even when the machinations of its plot threaten to send it careening off the tracks. Mitchum plays Jeb Rand, the last scion of a family that's been obliterated from the earth following a deadly and mysterious feud with the Cullum family. Ironically, then, it's a branch of the Cullums who take him in as a boy following the death of his parents, and he grows up under the protection of his adopted mother (Judith Anderson) who accepts him into the family and treats him as one of her children along with Thorley (Wright) and Adam (John Rodney). The film's most interesting aspect is the relationship that develops between Jeb and Thorley, despite their mother's best efforts to cultivate a healthy brother/sister bond in them. This relationship, though not incestual in the least, is somewhat strange nonetheless, especially since Jeb persists in calling their mutual mother "Ma" even as he's making out with his adoptive sister. The weirdness extends to their brother, with whom Jeb has a competitive, antagonistic relationship — in one scene, Adam lets slip that he's so enraged with his sister because she always thought of their family as consisting of the three of them, while he wants to winnow it down to just himself and his sister. While Thorley wants to get married and have a husband, Adam's vision extends only as far as his mother, his sister, and the ranch they own; if the incestuous subtext can't really exist with Jeb, it's in full flower here.

Unfortunately, though the film has a great setup and some marvelous scenes, it's hampered by structural flaws that drain a lot of energy out of the film's most interesting sequences and seriously undermine the darker emotions at this story's core. Chief among these failings is that the bulk of the film is related in flashbacks, which is a clumsy device even in the best of circumstances, and totally unnecessary in probably nine out of ten films that use it. The flashbacks here are especially egregious. They're told by Jeb to Thorley, supposedly as a way of tracing where they went wrong, even though she's already intimately familiar with most of the incidents he's recounting, and even though he tells stories about things that he didn't and couldn't witness for himself, and in some cases probably couldn't even know about. It's a ridiculous structure, and it would call attention to itself even if its effect on the actual narrative arc was minimal. But it also serves to drain a great deal of the tension out of the film's second half, because the film opens with a present-day sequence where Thorley and Jeb are obviously in love, even if external troubles are putting pressure on them. Their love is by no means certain in the flashbacks that form the film's second half, though, and in fact events drive Thorley into a hatred of her former love so deep that she becomes a kind of black widow, marrying him out of spite and planning to murder him on their wedding night.

This turn of events results in some of the film's most powerful material. Thorley as a hate-filled murderess is a thing to behold, and the angel-faced Wright does a surprisingly good job of conveying the churning emotions beneath her calm exterior. In the scene where she reveals her plot to her mother, her eyes glint maniacally, caught by the flickering light from a lantern that she holds up to her face, casting sinister shadows across her visage. It's the film's truest homage to the noir visual style, which recurs periodically in scenes like this, bathed in deep shadows with characters held as silhouettes. Walsh admirably captures the film's inner darkness in scenes like this, but he perhaps does too good a job considering the narrative's subsequent direction. Wright is far more believable (and interesting) when she's spiteful and bent on revenge, than when, just minutes later, she's abruptly reconciling with Mitchum and declaring her love for him. This turnabout, though telegraphed from the opening and the flashback structure, is never adequately explained, and it represents Walsh backing away from his momentary embrace of full-fledged noir aesthetics, retreating into horseback melodrama that grows way less interesting once Wright's anger has inexplicably fluttered away. Worse yet, even in the film's best scenes, the flashback structure undercuts the characters' powerful emotions, since we already know where they're going. Wright's rage, no matter how brilliantly conveyed by both her performance and the director's mise en scène, is impossible to reconcile with the doe-eyed, vapid movie heroine who's introduced in the opening scenes, so what might've been a compelling transformation from lovestruck young girl to raging femme fatale becomes a mere interlude in the film's essential love story.

Walsh is continually sabotaging his own storytelling in this way, so that a film that could have been a true classic is only fitfully interesting, and then mostly in the scenes that work against the film's overall thrust. For its innovative combination of a Western action setting with the psychological darkness of noir, Pursued remains an intriguing and entertaining genre-blender, but Walsh's failure to really commit to this film's best aspects unnecessarily hampers it as a whole.

Stereo/Sylvia Scarlett

Stereo is an early student film project from David Cronenberg, an hour-long feature made almost entirely on his own, on such a shoestring budget that he decided to entirely forgo sound recording. The result is a film that, even in its extreme minimalism and obvious amateur nature, is pure undistilled Cronenberg, an early indication of the themes and obsessions that would continue to haunt him throughout his later films. The film's central conceit is that the footage shown here is documentary material from something called the Canadian Academy for Erotic Enquiry (only in Canada!), where the mysterious Professor Stringfellow is conducting strange experiments in telepathy and sexuality with a group of eight young men and women. The bulk of the film is entirely silent, with the only sound being provided by an occasional voiceover, reading clinical and scientific descriptions and analyses in a detached, objective tone. Otherwise, the film plays out in a dead silence. This eerie stillness may have been necessitated by budgetary constraints, but it is nevertheless a perfect aesthetic complement to the film's inquiry into sensory deprivation, human communication, and the objective/subjective divide, especially as regards scientific research.

This divide between objective and subjective is most present in the gulf between image and sound in this film. While the voiceover impassively discusses the nature of telepathy and describes the theories and experiments of Stringfellow, the images present a messier world of social interaction and sexuality, far removed from the dry, textbook-style readings on the soundtrack. This gulf is almost never bridged, and as a result the sound and image seem to exist on different planes, commenting on and feeding into one another, but rarely coming completely into sync. The voiceover rarely ever seems like it's actually talking about the events of the images, which it purports to describe.

The best way to capture the film's mood is perhaps to quote from one of these lightly absurdist but earnest monologues: "We understand that the unique way in which an individual perceives and reacts to his environment is a function of his own experiential space continuum," the narrator says halfway through the film. "When object events enter the experiential space continuum of that individual, they become an integral, organic part of that space... But we are now feeling with telepathists, in theory, the interior space continua of two or more telepathists can merge, can blend together to an extent far beyond the range of normal human experience. What would be the organic nature of communal experiential space, shared among eight psychosomatic entities?"

Obviously, this psychological mumbo-jumbo points forward in many ways to Cronenberg's own Scanners, just as the film's clinical exploration of sexuality would later be taken up in Dead Ringers and Crash. This film is concerned, as many of Cronenberg's films would be, with alternative modes of human society and interaction, the creation of a new "experiential space." This expansion of human capability is located, as it usually is in these films, in the human mind itself, in expanded use of brain functions usually left undeveloped. Just as the community of telepaths in Scanners represented a new human social unit, tightly knit together within their own minds rather than through sensory or verbal interaction, the experiment depicted in Stereo is an attempt to reach a similar new paradigm in human society. The obvious subtext in these scenarios is an awareness of the inadequacy of society as it is now, and Cronenberg's films often represent imaginative recreations of social functioning in order to create a new and better society. That these transformations inevitably necessitate tremendous psychological and physical violence can be seen as a byproduct, an indicator of the rigidity and strength of the social norms being broken.

These themes are less developed in Stereo, really just a skeleton of the ideas they would later blossom into, but the film is nevertheless interesting, especially for Cronenberg admirers. The imagery of the film consistently belies the objective tone of the narration, as the camera (handled by Cronenberg himself) fluidly glides through the distinctive, angular corridors of the CAEE (actually the University of Toronto). While the voiceover maintains a clinical distance, the camera swoops in on the telepathic volunteers at the institute in even their most intimate moments. As an early sketch in the career of a director who would later fill in this broad outline with much richer details, Stereo is perhaps most worthwhile as a beginning, a starting point. But it is by no means worthless on its own merits, and its coolly detached examination of human subjectivity and relationships is a seminal example of David Cronenberg's keen eye for such subjects.

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George Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett is a deliriously strange and unsettling mess of a film, an irreconcilable collision of gender-bending sexual mutability with old-fashioned Hollywood normative romance and melodrama. The film casts Katharine Hepburn as young Sylvia, who disguises herself as Sylvester in order to help her father (Edmund Gwenn) escape an embezzling charge in France. The duo flee to London in disguise, as father and son, and along the way pick up the lowlife smuggler and thief Monk (Cary Grant). Together, the trio attempts to make a dishonest living by pulling cons. There are a great many twists and turns after that, especially when the trio is joined by a Cockney maid (Bunny Beatty) who the father falls for, and the quartet starts up a traveling vaudeville-type show performing for the rich all across the countryside. But the narrative is largely unimportant to the film's successes, and its increasingly baroque machinations are clearly not where Cukor's interests lie. Rather, the first half of the film is a clever inquiry into gender and sexuality, as the cross-dressing Hepburn charms both Grant and the upper-class artist Michael (Brian Aherne) with her boyish ways, while also seemingly attracting several women.

This bisexual play animates the film as long as Hepburn remains in drag. She is, it should be added, an almost totally unconvincing man, but it doesn't particularly matter, since the film as a whole is so unconcerned with being convincing in any regard. It starts with the accents, which are uniformly horrid and in any case keep slipping away and then back again at random. Grant is supposed to be sporting a lower-class Cockney drawl, which is bad enough, but he constantly forgets and falls into his standard Cary Grant persona — it's to his credit that he's such a natural that the shift is often barely even noticeable. It's harder to figure out quite what is going on with Hepburn's accent. She's supposed to be half French and half English, so I guess in some sense her all-over-the-place melange of accents and voices might represent her mixed heritage and upbringing, but it's still distracting, especially in the more melodramatic scenes. In lighter moments, she allows the accents to fall away, forgotten, and that's a relief, since her voice and natural comic poise go hand in hand, as in her more conventional screwball comedies. She's especially good at projecting her character's awkward attempts to sound like a man, as well as the moments when she forgets and slips up. This babble of voices, faked and put on, results in a meta-layer in which it's difficult to tell when the characters are meant to be faking a voice, and when it's the actors who are faking and forgetting. The scenario complicates things further by having the group pose as rich society folk for one of their scams, with Sylvia's father affecting an upper-class British whine for the ruse. It's a film about "passing," in terms of gender, sexuality, and class, and the emphasis is always on the voice as a marker of identity — one reason that the actors' missteps with their accents are so galling and ironic.

Despite this sometimes awkward execution, Hepburn's adventures as a man are riotously fun, and the closeted gay Cukor was clearly having a ball with this resonant scenario. From the moment Hepburn and Grant meet, there's a weird chemistry between them that clearly hints at some underlying (homo)sexual tension. At one point, getting ready to bunk up on a cold night, Grant tells Hepburn that "he" will make "a nice hot water bottle" to cuddle up next to. In another scene, Hepburn is kissed on the mouth by her father's lover, and later the lover of the man she wants (Aherne) can't resist giving her a peck on the cheek either. She seems to gather attention almost without regard to conventional sexuality, as though the confusion of gender roles serves to make her attractive to all genders and sexualities at once. Cukor stretches this material as far as it will go, and presumably as far as the strictures of 1930s Hollywood would allow; it's hard to imagine him getting away with much more, and even the obvious innuendo here considerably stretches the boundaries of the Hollywood romance. Nevertheless, this obviously couldn't be sustained for the whole picture, and the film inevitably has to unmask Hepburn and return her to her proper sex role, which is precisely the point when it ceases to be exciting and begins to drag and falter.

The plot complications necessary to affect this role reversal quickly descend, in the second half of the film, into trite melodrama — the kind where characters run out into the rain and scream, or jump to their deaths in the ocean — and it's obvious that Cukor loses much of his interest in the plot once Hepburn sheds her suit for a dress. There's a delightful moment, when Hepburn reveals herself as a girl to Aherne, when he simply cackles and yells out, "So that's why I was talking to you the way I was!" It's a telling line, suggesting that even before he knew she was a woman, Aherne was feeling the stirrings of attraction for her, and that while her revelation might sanction those feelings, make them acceptable, it doesn't substantially change the feelings themselves. This understanding of sexuality as a universal fact not always bound by traditional male/female dynamics is quickly discarded by the narrative, however, in favor of some much more conventional Hollywood theatrics. Cukor is so disinterested in this fluff that at one point he obviously dubs in a whole conversation of exposition while no one on screen is moving their lips at all. Sylvia does briefly change back into Sylvester during the second half, though, and Cukor takes the opportunity to insert a prison sequence with a knowing wink, having the two "men" spend the night in a jail cell together on the flimsiest of pretexts.

What all this adds up to, ultimately, is a totally confused and uneven film that's nevertheless a joy to watch, messiness and all. There are plenty of moments of great fun and pleasure, and the handful of rioutous party scenes look forward to Cukor's own later Holiday with their celebratory free spirit. The second half's melodrama often drags, and the conventional romantic resolution is something of a disappointment, if only because the film's first half promised such freshness, candor, and originality with regard to the Hollywood treatment of romance. That the film doesn't quite deliver on that promise doesn't diminish the sloppy, sporadic brilliance of much of this film, which in fits and starts serves to question and undermine the whole heterosexual, upper-class foundations of the Hollywood cinema.

12/13: The Brood

David Cronenberg has made a great number of disturbing films in his career, but perhaps none more viscerally affecting than The Brood, a horror film that aims not so much to scare you as to turn you inside-out, to make you squirm and recoil in disgust. In most of Cronenberg's films, he aims to take internal mental and emotional processes and give them an external physicality, a presence in the world to match their invisible importance in shaping the individual's psyche. The Brood is a film of tremendous physical impact. Its climactic horror scenes elicit none of the jumpy, jittery scares that most horror films resort to in order to provoke reactions, but Cronenberg's horror is no less physical, no less manipulative. It's a creeping, crawling psychological horror, enhanced by the fact that he keeps his little beasties off-screen for so much of the film, and when they finally appear, their awkwardness only accentuates their basic wrongness.

The monsters in question are the mentally generated spawn of Nola, who's played by Samantha Eggar, in a jaw-dropping performance that vacillates from vulnerability to utter creepiness, with a third act transformation that reminds me of Ashley Judd's recent turn in Bug. Nola is being counseled by the controversial psychologist Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), who believes that negative emotions can be channeled out of the body and manifest themselves in physical form. As it turns out, he's right, and Nola's anger grows into a brood of vicious "children" who respond to the vagaries of her mood by turning on the people she's angry with and killing them. So, basically, it's a horror film about PMS. And in some ways, it's also a viciously misogynistic portrait of motherhood and the parasitic relationship between mother and child. The film reflects a man's fear and distrust of feminine bodily processes and the uniquely privileged mother/child relationship, which is here warped into a nightmarish mockery. The horrors of childbirth, in particular, are explored in brutal detail in the final sequence, which I won't "spoil" for anyone who hasn't seen the film yet — suffice to say, it's one of the most bracing and stomach-turning scenes in cinema. In fact, Cronenberg admits that the film was directly inspired by a rather nasty divorce battle with his ex-wife, and consequently it's a film about the scars, mental and physical, imparted on us by our families and loved ones. Nola was physically beaten by her own mother as a child, and now that she's a mother herself, the suppressed rage bubbles over into her own new family.

It's a fascinating film, precisely because it couches Cronenberg's usual obsession with bodily transformation and the externalization of emotions in a much more straightforward horror context that he would create in his later films. Of course, all of Cronenberg's films might, to one degree or another, be called horror films, but few of them are rigorously scary. Most of his films are too pensive, too withdrawn from the horror of the situations or the characters involved, to really generate the frisson of sympathetic fear that good horror demands from its viewers. Perhaps because this film is so personal, and Cronenberg presumably identifies more closely than usual with its everyman hero, The Brood truly lives up to its billing as a horror flick. The film builds up a slow-burning terror that, strangely, has little to do with the monsters themselves or their actual violent actions. The creatures, though creepy in an alien sort of way, are small and child-like, and can also look faintly ridiculous bundled up in bulky children's coats with thick mittens, waddling around like overstuffed little penguins with hideous faces. So they're not scary in the way that, say, Freddy Krueger is scary. That is, they're not scary just because they're physically intimidating, or because they pose such a horrible threat — though they do rack up quite the body count for such little beasts. The terror in the film arises more from the very idea of these creatures, the knowledge that they are the external representation of ugly human feelings, that they are essentially birthed from the mind. They evoke a squirmy, almost metaphysical dread, the sense that they're somehow filthy, like thoughts that should never be aired so publicly.

This kind of uncomfortable feeling is a typical component in virtually all of Cronenberg's work. His films are not only images of people in the process of externalizing their inner worlds; he wants his audiences to question and think about their own inner worlds. His images are so provocative and over the top precisely in order to spark these examinations, to draw powerful associations between the visceral disgust he's eliciting and the primal human emotions and ideas that are linked to this disgust. In this case: motherhood, childbirth, sex, familial bonds. The film's complex psychological subtext is intimately interwoven with its images of transgressive birthing and warped motherhood, with the frightening idea that children are just the amalgamation of their parents' neuroses and anguish. In that regard, it's telling that the film ends with an image of Nola's daughter (her real one) as her father drives her home. Maybe the film's real horror is the idea subtly buried at its core, that Nola's monstrous "children" are just physically deformed variations on the internal warping of Nola's real child, who is being shaped and hurt by her parents in the same way that Nola was by her own.