Overlooked Pictures

In this long edition of SHORTS we discuss and debate for nearly the duration of a full length commentary.

Jules: More characters, more locations, more worms, more desert, and more engagement with themes of mass mind control and the metaphysics of destiny. DUNE may be Denis Villeneuve's dream project, but has it become his waking nightmare?

David: And speaking of dreams, why does the Fremen one based on myths and faith keep coming true, while the smarter-than-thou Bene Gesserit one based on calculations, manipulations and unholy trysts keeps turning out wrong? Who’s trolling who in the Dune-iverse? Meanwhile this dream franchise grows apace, drawing a sparse narrative from its dense source text, leaving space for sensorial nuance, albeit often at the expense of logic.

Jules: Roman Polanski's least controversial film may be one of his densest when it comes to themes and messaging. Based upon a subplot of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's 1993 novel The Club Dumas, Polanski plays out a love affair with books, their physicality, and their mystery. Johnny Depp's muted Dean Corso encounters the gamut of Polanskian caricatures, from the mephistophelian Frank Langella, the vampish Lena Olin, and the angelic Emmanuelle Seigner. 

David: Unlike the claustrophobic Rosemary's Baby before it, Polanski's second dance with the devil sees its protagonist cross the Atlantic to Mediterranean-adjacent lands, seeking to unravel the antics of an occult book club whose members, some unwittingly, compete for an audience with the devil. As a mysterious tome purportedly penned by the dark lord himself occupies the hero's attention, and its pages begin not only to echo but also presage unfolding events, does he himself stand to win the race or become merely hapless prey?

The inaugural episode of Overlooked SHORTS. Ironically focussing on one of the longest feature films in recent memory, Jules and David literally phone it in with a short commentary whilst not watching the movie. David recalls and Jules interrogates, surveying the technological innovations, the water, whales, wokeness and 3D wonders of Avatar: The Way of Water.

David: Each manifestation of Dune, including Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, can be viewed as a product of its time. Dune (2021) appears sanitised to accomodate the social and geopolitical tensions of the 21st Century. It’s also a different take on the huge weight of world-building detail in the novel and the choice whether to cram it into a movie or leave most of it out. Here we set out to cram some back in for you.

Jules: Is the tragedy of DUNE (2021) the same as the tragedy of DUNE (1984), namely that the best film of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel was David Lean's 1962 Lawrence of Arabia?

Jules: Do we deceive ourselves when we attempt to distinguish the sacred from the carnal? A small film made in a small village in a small (for Scandinavia) country seeks answers, as do we.

David: When a fortress of encrusted ascetic piety and propriety suffers an unexpected incursion of fabulous french cuisine, something more than its inhabitants' impoverished taste buds cracks open. Rather than the conflict against which the god-fearing community steels itself, Babette's state-of-the-art feast triggers a cathartic synthesis of sensory and spiritual joy, to the great elevation of all concerned. 

David: The perenniality of the vampire genre derives from its capacity for reinvention. Its form mimics its content in similar fashion to the zombie genre, transcending death. Here, the immortality of Jarmusch’s vampire couple is a perfect foil for retrophile hipsterism. They are aficionados of a lapsed cutting edge – analog technologies, first edition guitars, a dash of Tesla tech for colour and in the garage is a perfectly-poised-between-eras XJS Jaguar. They disdain contemporary ephemera and are content to await its fall. Only Lovers Left Alive takes its time. It may irritate some but bewitch others, who will return to bask in its sunless, bohemian langour.

Jules: Are vampire tropes a means or an end? Is the grand tradition of vampire fiction standing for nothing other than itself? Is it a debasement of said grand tradition to use vampirism as a metaphor, for themes like drug addiction, sexual obsession, metal illness, or mere aristocratic fecklessness? Or can a vampire picture possibly be nothing more than a cosy suburban story of rekindled love between senior citizens? The beautifully titled Only Lovers Left Alive ponders and enacts these and other questions to a delightful and confounding conclusion.

Jules: Alain Resnais' and Alain Robbe-Grillet's L'année dernière à Marienbad has astonished viewers for six decades and counting. Who, or what, are ‘A - la femme brune' (Delphine Seyrig), ‘X - l’homme à l'accent italien' (Giorgio Albertazzi, and ‘M - l'autre homme au visage maigre, le mari' (Sacha Pitoëff), and is this landmark of world cinema merely a film, or an initiatory experience akin to a rite of passage?

David: This film, both modern is its experimentation and postmodern in its self-reference, provides a meandering dream-like experience of unresolved narrative, unanswered questions, effects divorced from causes and a frustrating, potentially infuriating trap for the unwary viewer.

David: When a military prison devoted to regimentation, correction and the rebuilding of wayward units fails to manage its own, the hierarchy of power turns upon itself. As those who covet power scramble to avoid responsibility, repercussions twist and twist again into a Rubic’s cube of blame and counter blame. We salute the departing Sean Connery with this not-quite-obscure-but-lesser-known anti-Bond vehicle directed by Sydney Lumet.

Jules: A rare pleasure for those interested in well-constructed plots and characters who are just complex enough to support the dramatic conceit. Adroit and affecting work from all, especially Connery.

Jules: Is it possible to make a film about vampires that is not a vampire film? The genre is perennial, with familiar tropes that filmmakers endlessly adjust to achieve varied ends. Power, class struggle, sex, death, eternal life and eternal damnation; each theme intersects vividly across the genre. Neil Jordan seeks transcendence for his antiheronies, from their plight, and their genre within film, with some success.

David: At the heart of many a vampire story sits the dramatic tension between desire or love and the hunger to devour, and next to that the ultimate existential question - would immortality be a prize or a curse? Neil Jordan’s third foray into romantic horror and his second vampire-duo story (after Interview With The Vampire - 1994) this time with a gender flip, wanders among some interesting themes, though perhaps with more convolution and less art than it could have done.

David: A black satire perhaps running overlong with other ideas. It presages a spate of dark, disillusioned and memorably bleak films from the following year 1969. What does this say about the realities of 1968? The swinging 60s was as dead as the Summer of Love and the young boomers came out of it a cynical lot. This telling of the famous doomed  British cavalry charge overviews the production of cannon fodder, from street  urchins to gold-buttoned mounties of imperial glory and, with one blunder from overconfident under-experienced aristocrats of bought rank, into the valley of death. A reminder that war is most famous for its disasters. A stellar 60s British cast is present, featuring what must be Trevor Howard’s greatest role.

Jules: Is warfare a matter of duty, ambition, or efficient management? Tonal confusion meets tragicomedy in this anti-war epic.