Midi Minuit (1970)

Helene (Sylvie Fennec) and her beau Jacques (Jacques Portet) drive all the way out to the middle of nowhere to visit their pal Laurent Lorrain (Laurent Vergez), who is staying with his bizarro family of tortured/torturing artists.  Things get weird, to say the very least.

Pierre Phillipe’s Midi Minuit (aka Moon and Midnight) is excruciatingly odd and chaotic, yet it still manages to be captivating (probably because of its odd, chaotic structure).  It could easily stand comfortably next to the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky or Juan Lopez Moctezuma.  Not surprisingly, it also fits nicely in line with their Mouvement Panique which was founded on the idea of transgression surpassing the surreality in vogue at the time.  By that same token, Midi Minuit feels a bit toned down from something along the lines of, say, Alucarda.  Sure, there is the scene where Helene spies a woman held captive in chains, and later said woman is having sex with a man, suggesting in the way it’s portrayed that she is being used specifically as a sex object, just not necessarily unwillingly (these chains will come into play again later on in the film in a similar context).  But there are also scenes where characters, especially the creepy, quasi-pedophilic father Robert (Daniel Emilfork, perhaps better known for his appearance in City of Lost Children), will discuss things at length which feel both oblique and expositional.  

There’s no real plot to speak of, much like in Radley Metzger’s similarly-premised Score, but elements of one creep around the edges and cause moments in the film to happen that further reinforce its points.  Instead, the film is, first and foremost, about the discovery of Helene and Jacques that they, and by extension the audience, are all a bit mad.  They just need to discover it within themselves and allow it to blossom, and the Lorrain family is the key to this.  “Nympho” sister Elsa (the stunning Beatrice Arnac) goes through men like she goes through paint, and after she has them wrapped around her little finger, she dumps them in fickle acts of whimsy.  These jiltings typically involve her suggesting that her latest stud beat up her current one.  Sex and violence are inextricable to Elsa, because these are the only things she sees as useful in her self-centered world (the inspiration for her art, perhaps?), and she is up front about all of it.  Naturally, Jacques falls under her spell, and it costs him in more than one way.  Conversely, Laurent is sensitive on the outside, as evidenced by his wearing of a caftan and walking around shoeless like a hippie cult member.  He and Helene connect on a soulful, emotional level, but it won’t be until much later that his big secret is revealed (I have to say, it’s a doozy).  Elsa and Laurent share the same basic nature (read: insanity), just one is external and the other is internal.  It almost doesn’t matter which one of them draws in which of the outsider couple.  Jacques and Helene were going to be pulled in no matter what, because it’s all part of our base human nature.

Bearing this in mind, there is the metaphor of art as it relates to madness.  Robert enjoys acting out (non-sexual, at least onscreen) stories and/or fantasies with his coterie of young playmates, and he isn’t above getting a kick out of drugging someone (courtesy of uni-browed boy toy and all-around chemist Walerian [Patrick Jouane]) and watching the results.  His art is philosophical in nature; after all, he’s the ring leader.  The youngest Lorrain sibling (Veronique Lucchesi) performs pagan rituals involving pigeon sacrifices, takes and beats prisoners in militaristic roleplaying games, and revels in jesting about the “sadic of the garrigue” (basically, “the sadist of the Mediterranean region of Southern France where this film is set” … I think).  According to Elsa, she’s “on the right path.”  Speaking of Elsa, her paintings are High Renaissance in style (from what I could discern of them), especially in how they focus on the representation of the flawless (male) human form.  Laurent’s art is primarily in metalworks, perfectly shaped and alluring in its shininess while also having the ability to wound with its sharp edges and pointy ends.  In the same way that the insanity within Elsa and Laurent is displayed as external and internal, respectively, their art seems to be the opposite; Elsa’s is more traditional, while Laurent’s is experimental.  Even the “estate” the Lorrains live on reflects madness and art as lifestyles.  The place is in ruins.  The rooms are strewn with fur throw rugs and stuff that appears to be trash and lamp sculptures that have to be manipulated to operate.  The “family dining room” is more or less a cave with a large round stone table.  The images of decay are married to the images of art floating around the place, and they form a union between art and psychopathy that weighs heavy on every frame of the film.

Midi Minuit is at constant odds with itself, the same as the characters embody the duality of beauty and madness.  We get Hitchcockian moments like in the shot where Helene is stripping down to go skinnydipping, and the camera pulls back to reveal a dead man lying on the hill overlooking the water.  Then we get constant smash cuts to things which may be only tangentially connected to the scene they’re cut into, may be some portent of things to come, or may be just images intended to shake up the viewer from traditional modes of watching films, fragmenting linear narrative with non-sequitur symbolic images.  For example, as Laurent, Helene, and Jacques are driving around, there is a quick cut to an image of the same person in chains Helene saw earlier (or maybe it’s someone else), only this time the person is in a car which is being driven around.  There is no other reference to this image in this context in the film at all.  Helene and Robert have a conversation that is loaded with metaphorical subtext (both in what’s said and in what’s seen; Helene is explicitly included in Robert’s childish theatrics, and she either plays along or gives in to it) but relates directly to Helene’s feelings for Laurent.  The film jumps around like mad (no pun intended), and even though I honestly couldn’t say precisely what’s going on at a given moment or what it necessarily means, I still found myself ultimately following along and rather enjoying the ride.  For me, it appeals just enough to the avant garde and the exploitative sides of my cinephilic character (there’s that madness creeping in?).  It’s as visceral as it is elliptical, and while I would say it won’t appeal to every cinematic taste by a long stretch, it’s very much recommended by me to those with more adventurous filmic appetites.

MVT:  The film is so bizarre.  Yup, that’s about it.

Make or Break:  The first dinner scene will fully let the viewer know whether or not Midi Minuit will play to their fancy.

Score:  7/10            

Crystalbrain (1970)

Sir Cliffton Reynolds (or maybe Reynold Cliffton according to the subtitles I had, but either way he’s played by Eduardo Fajardo) is a London judge plagued with intense headaches of late.  Dr. Chalmers (Frank Wolff) tells Cliff that he has about six months left to live, but the good doctor also has a possible solution.  Chalmers suggests that what Cliff needs is a new brain, comparing his proposed procedure to the transplanting of primate hearts into humans.  Cue Ginetto Lamberti (Simón Andreu), a working man who currently lies dying in the street, but whose brain is in perfect (this is subjective) working order.  But will this transplant prove to be a transmigration of Ginetto’s soul, or just an excuse for Cliff to go insane?

Juan Logar’s Crystalbrain (aka L’uomo Dal Cervello Di Cristallo aka Trasplante De Un Cerebro) is an amalgamation of genres.  It owes as much to gialli as it does to science fiction, as it does to psychothrillers, as it does to horror.  What it harks back specifically to, however, is the classic The Hands of Orlac and its profligate progeny.  The earlier story concerns a pianist who has the hands of a murderer grafted onto his arms, and the “influence” the hands begin to exert on his psyche.  This conceit, that a foreign body part introduced onto/into a “normal” person having a deleterious effect, is an intriguing one.  It plays both as a straight horror paradigm and as an investigation of pure human nature.  Most people like to think that they are, at heart, good.  But what if you were given an excuse to unleash your id, to behave in a way antithetical to your public personality?  Characters in these types of stories believe so deeply that their transplants have power, they allow their personae to transform, and rarely for the better.  Their darkest aspects rise to the forefront.  Many times, they become obsessed with discovering why their transplant died or with taking revenge on those who killed them.  Who, then, is the true personality?  The one who existed before the operation or the one who was created afterward?  Was one just masking the other?  Cliff appears to be a decent person before his procedure.  He believes that “justice balances right and wrong.”  He loves his wife Susan (Nuria Torray) and his brother Peter (Angel del Pozo).  While he doesn’t turn evil after the transplant, Cliff certainly becomes more than a little unhinged.  One way to look at the ensuing events in his life is that his sense of morality intensifies and drives him to find closure in the name of Ginetto by appropriating the Italian fisherman’s psyche.

In this same way, there is the notion that transplants actually do have power over the transplantee.  In these cases, the fantastic element raises issues of identity and loss of same, perhaps even more than looking at it through a purely psychological lens.  The introduction of organs not our own suggests an invasion of our body (in fact, that’s exactly what it is), an attack on who we are.  The invader is usually malignant in nature and more powerful than the host body.  The transplant typically proceeds in wreaking havoc on the transplantee’s life and loved ones, and there is nothing the weaker of the two can do because, through the process of the transplant, they are, by definition, no longer wholly themselves.  Their identity is no longer their own because their bodies are no longer their own, strictly speaking.  In Crystalbrain, this idea is a bit easier to believe because the human brain is the whole of our conscious being.  Our hands may be adept at a certain skill, but that’s because our mind has trained them to be so.  Naturally, this trope also implies in some way that muscle memory goes further than being the unconscious ability to perform constantly repeated tasks.  Here, pieces of the donor contain the active personality (or aspects of the personality) of the donor.  The transplantee, being in a weakened state, is possessed through these parts.  It’s a bit like The Thing in that every piece of a donor contains the whole of him/herself.  

We, as an audience, may or may not buy any of this under normal circumstances.  A hand or a kidney is truly nothing more than a machine (or a part of a machine) without a power source.  Nonetheless, the big question that comes up in this film is how does Chalmers not consider that Cliff’s personality would be completely changed by his operation?  When questioned about this (“Do you think it’s morally responsible to destroy a soul to heal a body?”), he simply states that doctors have to stave off death whenever they can.  But he’s not saving Cliff’s life.  If anything, he’s saving Ginetto’s life by giving him Cliff’s body.  What the hell kind of medical professional do you have to be to not understand that?  The only way to explain it is that Chalmers believes that our psyche (or here, our “soul”) resides in our whole body, not just in our skulls (and he’s supposedly a man of science).  Frankly, he never should have been given a medical license, but what can you do?  

Logar and company deal with the disparate personalities of Cliff and Ginetto in a stylistically interesting way.  During Cliff’s surgery, he flashes back to the many people on whom he has passed judgment, and they each appear in double exposure alongside Cliff as he pronounces sentence.  They are voiceless; Cliff is in power, and his sense of justice is secure.  Later, when Cliff visits the cemetery where Ginetto’s body is buried, he envisions a series of people who are directly in his and Ginetto’s lives (Chalmers, Susan, Ginetto himself, et cetera), again in double exposure, and they all call out to him.  They are now tormenting Cliff.  He is no longer in control of his life or his being, but justice must still be served.  The duality of Cliff and Ginetto is tied together in this simple way, and I felt it was fairly successful.  

The editing of the film is also fragmented.  Time and space change in a heartbeat with little to no establishment of what’s going on or when these events take place.  Like the Crystalbrain of the title, not only is Cliff’s mind fragile, ready to be shattered, but the cinematic world these characters inhabit is equally splintered.  It’s an off-kilter approach, and it reflects what Cliff is going through.  He’s uncertain of who he is (right up until he’s certain, yet even then…).  His mind is unreliable, and the film’s construction is equally untrustworthy (although, as with so many foreign films of this ilk and time period, we can’t be completely certain how many editors’ hands this passed through), forcing us to fill in blanks and play catch up; essentially placing us in the protagonist’s shoes to some small degree or another.  Admittedly, the film is headscratching in its logic, and Cliff acts in a manner easy to disbelieve, even with all that’s happening to him.  It treats its supporting characters like props more than people, and I think this robs the film of the impact it may have had.  Even at eighty-five minutes, the story is not particularly well-paced, either.  And yet, it stands out among its peers, even if only as a curiosity rather than a revelation.

MVT:  The approach to the narrative is distinctive and interesting, and I would guess that the filmmakers at least tried to tell their story in a unique fashion.

Make or Break:  The scene in the cemetery, where Cliff (or Ginetto, depending on your perspective) hallucinates (or does he?).

Score:  6.5/10    

The Aquarians (1970)

Few things in the world caused me to titter with delight when I was young quite so much as the name “Lake Titicaca.”  There was a moment in time when underwater photography was a big selling point for mass media, and people such as the late, great Jacques Cousteau brought their pure sense of wonder for the deep into millions of families’ households on a regular basis.  In fact, it was through that man that I first heard this lake’s moniker, so blame him.  After all, what child wouldn’t get joy out of pronouncing two words you weren’t supposed to pronounce?  Together?  In the same word?  To my eternal shame, the name still manages to bring a smirk to my face.  Incidentally, the name “Titicaca” translates (according to some) as “Rock Puma,” and this only makes it sweeter to a pre-adolescent (and adolescent, and even adult) mind.  “Rock Puma” would be a great name for a superhero character (and, more obviously, a rock band; apologies to Dave Barry).  Nevertheless, Lake Titicaca is a large body of water, and like all large bodies of water (and some small ones) it contains mysteries both mundane and exotic.  I mean, who among us can say what truly lies at the bottom of a lake, what doesn’t want to be discovered, what will resist being dragged out into the cold light of reason?  Even with the most modern equipment overseen by the most stolid of explorers, some enigmas refuse to be unraveled.  And that’s their charm.

Don McDougall’s The Aquarians opens with plenty (and I mean plenty) of footage of the ocean depths (courtesy of Ricou Browning, director of Mr. No Legs but likely better known to cinephiles as the Gillman from The Creature From The Black Lagoon [at least in the underwater scenes; the monster was played by Ben Chapman for the scenes on land]) narrated with expository parchedness by none other than Leslie Nielsen.  In due course, we are introduced to Luis Delgado (Ricardo Montalban), the head of Deep Lab, a research station located five hundred feet beneath the waves.  After an interminable amount of nothing occurs, Delgado and his lackeys are whisked away to the African nation of Aganda (which to the best of my knowledge is fictitious, though I was never any good at geography) to investigate the sudden death of almost all sea life in the immediate vicinity.  The answer to the mystery is intriguing (and spoiled right in the film’s IMDb synopsis, not that it’s in any way shocking or all that important to the plot; it’s a straight up McGuffin), but what’s done with it isn’t.

I’m going to say right off the bat that I was let down by this film, though it posits enough compelling aspects that it’s kind of inexcusable.  A group of adventurers cruising around the bottom of the ocean is one of the most innately exciting premises ever.  There’s tension simply in the surroundings (which could kill you if you walked out the “front door”), but unlike outer space, the locales (theoretically) are easier to get to.  Add in some espionage goodness, and you bring in Disaster film elements (something Irwin Allen exploited to the hilt with his movie and subsequent television series Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea).  Further, there are Science Fiction components like the creation of an artificial gill and a deepwater submersible that’s a cross between a UFO from Monster Zero and the Venus Space Probe from what we all know were the best episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man (outside of those with Bionic Bigfoot, naturally).  Montalban proves hands down that he could carry a feature (with or without a neckerchief), and I found myself dreading the moments he wasn’t onscreen.

So, how could all of these things add up to a dry, dull viewing experience?  For starters, there is an overabundance of underwater photography.  I get that a large portion of the reason this was even produced was to showcase such images, but they tend to drag on aimlessly, becoming a blue-tinted visual drone.  The footage that does have action in it is glacial (more a matter of physics than anything else, I’d wager), and it’s not exploited properly to ramp up suspense, at any rate.  It’s all very matter of fact.  Outside of Delgado, the cast of characters are distinguishable as characters in name only.  They exist solely to be the jobs they perform, with little to no differentiation between them (the one standout being Katherine Woodville’s Barbara Brand, though this is more due to biological happenstance than anything written into the script).  

Further, the film is focused on procedure to the point of tedium.  Now, I am a fan of procedure.  I love Police Procedurals, and a good Heist film can thrill me to no end.  I am enthralled by the scrutinization of the details of a plan/crime and watching said minutiae be laid out to the smallest dust mote.  I tend to be myopic in my own approach to procedures.  That’s just me.  Nonetheless, there is no excitement generated in the procedures in The Aquarians.  It doesn’t hit peaks and valleys of overcoming and being overcome by obstacles culminating in ultimate success.  It is instead the stereo instructions of plot progression (and I mean that in the bad way).  Even when depth charges are being flung at our intrepid protagonists, it’s reacted to like plucking a long nose hair: Sure, it stings, but no biggie, and it has to get done regardless.  In fact, if an enterprising person were to research wasted opportunities in filmed media, one would be the casting of Walton Goggins in Django Unchained.  The other would be the sum totality of parts that is The Aquarians.  The filmmakers even managed to never have any direct physical conflict with the bad guys; astounding, since three of the film’s heroes are very able-bodied young men, and the villains include Chris Robinson, no stranger to badassery (see Revenge Is My Destiny for further proof).

The film isn’t empty-headed.  It’s simply poorly handled.  It has an eco-crusader angle that was big (and getting bigger) in the Seventies.  It does a nice job balancing its respect for the ocean with its notions about exploiting it (for the betterment of man, of course).  It deals with the perversion of science and the manipulation of good men for evil purposes.  The potential for the character of Delgado is enormous, as he’s a clinical prick of a man, but he cares about what he does and the people he does it with (again, expertly portrayed by Montalban).  And the film wastes all of this.  Perhaps as background noise (along the lines of the Yule Logs stations used to air around Christmas), The Aquarians could serve a purpose.  Unfortunately, entertainment isn’t one of them.

MVT:  Montalban gets the dubious distinction.  He really does carry himself with authority, and you believe that he believes every word he says.

Make Or Break:  The Break is no one scene.  It is the aggregate of the lack of action and lack of personality in the plot and every character engaged in it (save one; I’m sure you can guess their identity).  

Score:  5/10