My Dream Double-Bills

Graphic by Maryam ElSharkawy

CLIMAX + SHOWGIRLS

Climax, 2018. Directed by Gaper Noé

Showgirls, 1995. Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Gasper Noé’s Climax, a title itself indicative of maximalism, sees the dance film genre at its most extreme. Adding to Noé’s own controversial repertoire of the French extremity movement, Climax sees a group of dancers inhabit a womb-like, abandoned school building as they rehearse choreography, muse on sexuality, and drink sangria - all before realising their drinks have been laced with LSD. Concurrently, audiences are confronted with real-time sequences of performance drawn out to indulgent, frustrating disorientation; the film’s hexing, metronomic depictions of voguing and contortion become the film’s topography, it’s bravura. Submerged into the cool waters of Noé’s infamous, canted camera angles, signaling his aesthetic devotion to corporeality and disjointedness, bodies fall in and out of disharmony with the camera and each other. Climax constitutes a frenzied, enervating disruption to conventional filmmaking, and in the aeon of global lockdowns, there has never been a more suitable time to encounter a film of such visceral isolation. 

Described as one of the “worst films ever made”, Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls is as divisive as a film can get. At its surface, Showgirls sees nomadic, cut-throat dancer Nomi Malone attempt to navigate cycles of hyper-sexualisation in the showgirl industry of Vegas, dictated by chauvinistic male employers. In Verhoeven’s world, (one subtly, aesthetically suggestive of a drug-induced alternate reality), each frame is a mouthful of set-design, each shot packed full of anti-realism. Nomi must acclimatize to the erotica in order to survive, and so she does. 

It is entirely understandable that Showgirls is so often met with resistance. It is a disorientating oscillation between cinematic devices; an assemblage of hammy lines, overacting, dance numbers, and farce. The film is a self-reflexive exploration of the disparity between directors and performers. In fact, it is precisely its formal disorder that makes Showgirls a touchstone of cinephilia. Verhoeven implements and contrasts devices to cohere into a vertiginous collage of extreme cinema, one that can, (and often is), viewed through the lens of camp - or, the associated category, “so bad it’s good”. However, while the film’s formal expression undoubtedly pays homage to camp, the satire in Showgirls clearly targets North American narcissism and corruption. Sexuality is coded as economic; bodies are the price to pay in the pursuit of capitalist ambition. Indeed, rather than exploiting feminine sexuality, Showgirls, quite liberally, cautions against the dangers of stepping inside the rabbit-hole of men and women alike who blur the lines between sexual agency and depravity. Verhoeven’s complicated exhibition of one extreme, stereotypical version of sexualisation challenges audiences to feel overwhelmed by the silliness of its representation. It is perhaps this shift, this uncomfortable push into uncharted perspectives, which is most responsible for the film’s misunderstanding.

BETTY BLUE + PARIS, TEXAS

Betty Blue, 1986. Directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix

Paris, Texas, 1984. Directed by Wim Wenders

Paris, Texas and Betty Blue are cut from the same cloth; both defiant against the glossiness of neoliberal 1980s culture, both offering a poetic meditation on the art of detachment. Betty Blue, the lesser-known of the two films, sees a young couple navigate the ebbs and flows of their romantic connection, despite its disruption from external forces - landlords, placelessness, and most disruptive of all, Betty’s own wavering mental stability. Though superficially similar in subject matter, and for their breathtaking lead performances, Betty Blue is at odds with cinephile favourite A Woman Under the Influence. However, unlike its predecessor, Betty Blue’s thematic exploration of mental illness is rather precarious. Jean-Jacques Beineix aims to reconcile the ‘unknowable feminine’ - the mentally ill woman in conjunction with her adoring partner - with the sexual freedom of feminist cinema, though, naturally, the consequences of this particular depiction are now viewed as contentious. Audiences take issue with Betty’s rather eroticised construction; her character a projection of the hysterical, troubled woman, her focalisation aligned with an outsider’s gaze than with subjectivity. Representational politics aside, however, Betty Blue is a dazzlingly stylish film, (its poster esoterically adorned the bedroom wall of every film student in the 80s), it is an essential of the Cinéma du look movement.

Though it is not an easy film to describe, Paris, Texas is often listed amongst the ranks of cinephiles’ favourite films; it befits the general criteria of all favourite films, its favourability rooted in instinct rather than analysis. Wim Wenders’ magnum opus is a feast of temptatious imagery, symbol, and narrative, and yet I believe the film’s resplendence, (or at least my own response to it), is grounded in something untraceable. Paris, Texas opens with a quasi-surreal atmosphere, owed in part to Robby Müller’s nostalgic and bewitching score. We see a possessionless Travis, who we learn is victim to dissociative fugue, as he ambles across arid portions of the West Texas desert - his direction and purpose noticeably unclear. And yet, there is such directness to this sequence. Following its idiosyncratic beginning, the film’s emotionality is indebted to Wenders’ non-verbal, rather spiritual deftness in introducing a world so palpable; its visuality is a mirage of reds, blues, sunbaked deserts, and the frosted neons of interstate highways. One finds themselves almost distracted, and certainly enticed by, the glorious aesthetics of what is essentially an odyssey of searching for a long-missing wife and mother. Justifying their pairing, both Betty Blue and Paris, Texas reckon with the lingering, often inarticulate despairs of incompatibility and emotional separation. Images are bathed in honesty, bodies pass through like dust.

ALL THAT JAZZ + SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK

All That Jazz, 1979. Directed by Bob Fosse

Synecdoche, New York, 2008. Directed by Charlie Kaufman

Bob Fosse (All That Jazz) and Charlie Kaufman (Synecdoche, New York) demonstrate the freedoms of self-insertion and metafiction, both sumptuously devoted to theatre directors grappling with life on and off stage. With a sense of self-awareness rooted in the fashionable movement of auto-fiction, Fosse and Kaufman posture their artistic careers parallel to physical decay, visualising the cost of success through the most embodied, sacrificial frameworks conceivable. All That Jazz is one of the most enormous films to date. By enormous I refer to its exponentially growing set designs, its formal experimentalism, no less it’s philosophical scale. How does one write a film like All That Jazz? Must it challenge audiences in order to emulate the perfunctory, impossible task of stepping outside one’s own timeline and cinematising its materiality? Must it didactically caution us of the self-neglect and narcissism required in the very act of making a film so personally insertive? In both All That Jazz and Synecdoche, New York, life is performance; death a final curtain call. 

Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York is lyrically symbolic, riddled with motifs that encourage audiences to not only soak up its abstractions of life and death but to piece them together. Kaufman navigates this balance with pernicious care. Synecdoche, New York is a mosaic of aging, tempered with whimsical depictions of such. In this slippage between the two, grappling with life’s terrifying rapidity and its poetic realization, both Synecdoche, New York and All That Jazz see their directors reconcile art with the artist; creativity with splendorous immortalisation; they confront the metaphysics of their legacy head-on.

OUT OF THE BLUE + ALICE IN THE CITIES

Out of the Blue, 1980. Directed by Dennis Hopper

Alice in the Cities, 1974. Directed by Wim Wenders

In Out of the Blue, (the title referring to Neil Young’s hit song), teenager Cebe reputes the dangers and ills of adulthood, or at least her parents’ experience of it. Her mother is a heroin addict, whilst her father is incarcerated for homicide. Responsively, Cebe configures her own corrupted trajectory, she champions autonomy above all else. She greases her hair with shoe polish, smokes, sneaks into bars, and resides in the company of strangers. Vulnerably, although fronted with a sharp-edge, Cebe frames the world as her own playbook. She inhabits the music of Elvis and punk rock for comfort and resilience. Indeed, her adamance to shadow her greatest icons becomes a fierce rejection of the adults who belittle and harm her, no matter the cost. Headlights from passing cars flicker across Cebe as she sleeps in the front seat of a pick-up truck - it’s better to burn out than to fade away.

Featuring Wenders twice in this list not only attests to my adoration for his films but also emphasises his filmography’s thematic universality. Wenders’ films are serene, providing careful considerations on the grandest of subjects: the art of loss, identity, connection, drifting, and rather subtly, childhood. Depictions of childhood certainly inform Alice in the Cities, Wenders’ black and white road-movie that sees Philip, a writer, and Alice, a young child, bound together by circumstance. Beginning in New York and ending on a train traveling to Munich, Alice in the Cities is a product of Wenders’ own partial rejection of US modernity. Ventriloquised through Philip’s scepticism of mass media, with echoes of Susan Sontag’s On Photography, Alice in the Cities balances scepticism with earnest, languid depictions of movement. As if figuratively casting aside its cultural critique, and accessing the innocence of childhood naivety, large swathes of the film’s duration are rather mundane, as Wenders’ camera embraces the quietness of hotels, cross-country driving, diners. Images are strung together as if through the haze of a child slipping in and out of consciousness in the backseat of a moving car, perceiving a world animated in slumber.

GREY GARDENS + THE GLEANERS AND I

Grey Gardens, 1975. Directed by Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Muffie Meyer

The Gleaners and I, 2000. Directed by Agnès Varda

Aside from both being documentaries, The Gleaners and I and Grey Gardens share one aspect of undeniable significance; a devotion to objects and the people who possess them. Grey Gardens peers inside the stasis of former upper-echelon socialites Little Edie and Big Edie, glamorous fixtures in a decrepit home littered with memorabilia. Physically engulfed by materials of their opulent past lives, and surrounded by troves of keepsakes, memories decorate objects with a luminous halo. Unwilling to discard these possessions, at the risk of losing their assigned significance, the two women fill their days reminiscing and admiring troves of chachkies, costumes, and photographs - which are irreconcilable with their present lives. Since its release in 1975, the documentary has amassed a cult following, however, its notability is not owed to the intrigue of its subject. Grounded in postmodern ideas regarding performance and artifice, and a shift from cinéma vérité, Grey Gardens’ reverence is in its formal innovation. Fronted by such performative women - more like fictional sisters, they sing and bicker incessantly - Grey Gardens signals a movement within the documentary form towards realism as a dramatic art in itself.

The lesser-known feature of this double-bill sees Agnès Varda lay bare her directorial sensitivity in The Gleaners and I. This 2000 documentary depicts Varda as she travels throughout rural and urban working-class France to encounter those who glean; those who salvage leftovers from harvests, streets, markets, and tips. Reasons for gleaning are historicised, through Varda’s sporadic insertions of paintings which depict gleaning, and through upholding a camera to the individuals she chances in these spaces. Some, we discover, glean out of financial necessity, others in accordance with their eco-politics, or as a means to socially engage with their community. Some glean as an artistic process. “Art is the tidying of inner and outer worlds”, Varda is told by a collagist, as he exhibits a collective of items he salvaged. Certainly, Varda’s subject matter correlates with the presently eco-conscious milieu, and yet, this framework is just one layer of its significance. Like all Varda’s films, her filmmaking is an accumulation of play and empathy; a paean of reveling in one’s surroundings. Surmised by such a self-reflexive interpretation of the documentary form - a lens-cap swings in frame, Varda’s aging hand swallows passing automobiles - before The Gleaners and I, there has, perhaps, never been such tangible affability in Varda’s oeuvre. One hand holding the camera, the other gleaning heart-shaped potatoes, seems an appropriate moment to recall.