Backrooms

Whatever their artistic merits, the commercial success of Kane Parsons' Backrooms and Curry Barker's Obsession is a truly heartening sign of life for the American film industry. Before the summer onslaught of sequels, retreads, and video game adaptations, it was very pleasing to film buff Biff that two original films from newcomers are runaway box office successes. After viewing Backrooms, I was particularly chuffed that such an abstract and avant leaning film has been embraced by the US public, particularly by those 35 and under. It is A24's biggest hit to date, already outgrossing Marty Supreme. Backrooms has a plot, but its chief attribute, which commences once Chiwetel Ejiofor discovers a portal to a parallel world in the basement of his furniture store, is Parsons' camera prowling the negative space of a world redolent of corporate offices and strip malls. This conveys a sense of dread that lingers despite the narrative seeming like a distended Twilight Zone episode. 

Ejofor plays Clark, a frustrated architect living in a mythical city in 1990 who manages a pathetic furniture store for his daily bread. He has recently undergone a painful divorce and attends therapy session with his doc, Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve). After Clark discovers the portal, he enlists two collegiate videographers to document what he has discovered. Unsurprisingly, the duo become the film's sacrificial lambs for a monster lurks in the maze of this mysterious kingdom. Mary Kline becomes concerned about Clark and stumbles upon the portal. Flashbacks of her childhood, when she was a prisoner in the house of her mad mother, illuminate her struggle to metaphorically and literally walk through windows. A single survivor is left at film's end. A high tech firm has been monitoring the parallel world and is able to make an extraction. A company pooh-bah (deftly played by Mark Duplass) debriefs the survivor, functioning much like Simon Oakland's character in Psycho. As in Psycho, the explanation given mystifies rather than clarifies.

The visual landscape of Backrooms is a picture of suburban desolation and anomie. Indeed, the suburban strip malls of America in 2026 are even more empty after the rise of internet retailers. As the musical group Priests put it:

                           I was jogging to a strip mall

                           I felt nothing at all

                          Nothing I can recall

                          Besides Dollar Tree, Sears and Thai Bistro

Even before we enter the film's Interzone, the portrait of 1990 America is depressing. The colors of the costumes and decor are subdued and ugly. The film is a symphony in taupe and off white. Even when a color like blue is used it is a subdued blue rather than a vivid one. This fits the emotional tenor of the film. Clark and Mary both live a lonely existence, each haunted by the demons of the past. Ejiofor and Reinsve limn their characters' stress and isolation superbly. I was somewhat distracted by Reinsve's Norwegian accent, but that is a very minor complaint.  

Master Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik have extrapolated Backrooms from Parsons' YouTube series of the same name. However, the idea for this project did not just emerge full blown like an Athena from the cheesypastaverse. There are antecedents. Mark Z. Danielewski's 2000 horror novel House of Leaves has a similar premise. While Parsons' characters travel horizontally into an alternative multiverse, Danielewski's descend vertically into darkness. With its labyrinthine tracking shots, Backrooms reminded me of Michael Snow's Wavelength and Kubrick's The Shining. Indeed, the labyrinth is the one of the central motifs in Kubrick's oeuvre. Regardless, I feel Backrooms can stand on its own. I don't think it is a great film, but it is a startling debut. 

Downstairs

Virginia Bruce, Paul Lukas, and John Gilbert form a triangle in Downstairs

Monta Bell's Downstairs is a fitfully entertaining 1932 drama released by MGM. Leading man John Gilbert has penned the screenplay in the silent era and then dusted it off in the hopes of reviving his flagging career. Gilbert plays the part of an unscrupulous chauffeur newly hired by a German Baron (Reginald Owen). Gilbert arrives on the wedding day of two members of the Baron's staff, Paul Lukas' butler and Virginia Bruce's parlor maid, and promptly establishes himself as a total cad by hitting on the bride. Bruce initially is able to resist Gilbert's advances, but comes to realize that he floats her boat more than the upright Lukas. Gilbert's chauffeur is such a total rotter that while he is making time with Bruce (soon to be the fourth Mrs. Gilbert), he is also coming onto the households' aged cook. The cook's appeal to him lies not in her feminine charms, but in the bankroll secreted in her stockings. Amidst these shifting and shifty alliances, the Baroness (Olga Baclanova) has a lover on the side. A situation the chauffeur exploits for blackmail.

Downstairs is an weird film that wizzes by at 77 minutes utilizing odd juxtapositions and iris dissolves. It is handsomely appointed with cinematography by Harold Rosson and art direction by the ubiquitous Cedric Gibbons. However, Monta Bell's direction never finds a consistent tone. The film veers from comedy to near tragedy without ever finding its footing. What makes the film palatable is its superior cast. Owen and Baclanova are one of the most hilariously mismatched couples in the history of cinema. Bruce and Gilbert generate a scent of eros. Bodil Rosing, best known as the maid in Sunrise, is affecting as the cook. Best of all is Paul Lukas who makes the stock role of the cuckolded husband believable. Downstairs also features Hedda Hopper as a former employer/lover of Gilbert's, Otto Hoffman, Lucian Littlefield,  and an uncredited Karen Morley in the final scene.

On a personal note, I can attest that the notion that the chauffeur was the great god Pan of the 1920s and 30s was not pure fancy. My wife and I were gifted a box of linens by my mother. They had lain in a closet in my parents' house since the death of my mother's aunt a decade earlier. When I opened the box I spied a selection of monogrammed hand towels. They bore an initial I did not recognize. Apparently, my great aunt had had a first husband who was not mentioned in my presence. When I queried mom about it: "Oh, yes", she replied, "she ran off with her chauffeur."

Beyond the Clouds

Peter Weller and Chiara Caselli

Michelangelo Antonioni's Beyond the Clouds, released in late 1995, is a film about interlocking sexual entanglements set in four different European locales. The picture was based on a book of short stories Antonioni published in 1983 entitled That Bowling Alley on the Tiber. In 1985, Antonioni suffered a stroke and was partially paralyzed till the end of his days. He was only able to make Beyond the Clouds with the assistance of Wim Wenders, though their relationship was somewhat contentious. Wenders added binding episodes and narration featuring John Malkovich as a traveling director musing on love and life. Antonioni was able to jettison some of the scenes featuring Malkovich, but not all of them. Similarly, sequences featuring Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau were shot by Wenders, but only a single scene remains. The scene offers a self-reflexive take on artistry invoking Cézanne. The question raised is whether an artist repeats himself. Wenders, the auteur, admits that it is inevitable.

The other element that smacks more of Wenders than Antonioni is the soundtrack, the presence of U2 being the tell. It didn't work for me, especially the instrumental Van Morrison numbers used as love motifs. They are too sentimental for an Antonioni picture, even an autumnal one, and I count myself a Van Morrison fan. Wenders was able to prevail upon Antonioni to trim some of the sex scenes, particularly one of Peter Weller going down on Chiara Caselli. Even so, some observers, like Michael Atkinson of the Village Voice, found the amount of young female flesh on display to be gratuitous. It does seem like every female actress under forty gets totally nekkid in this flick. I am a little more tolerant of this than Mr. Atkinson. Seniors should be indulged their erotic reveries since some of them can only dream rather than do.

Vincent Perez and Irène Jacob

What is best about Beyond the Clouds and most distinctively Antonionian is its mise-en-scène. The film is otherworldly gorgeous. Lovers tease each other as they walk down ancient streets and foggy corridors pitched on the edge of oblivion. The eternal recurrence of romance, its ebb and flow, is evoked through water imagery. Parting and its sweet ache are memorably evoked. What is most uneven about the film is the acting. It is as if the players hit their marks and then could do what they want. Malkovich is fine and Irène Jacob is sublime. Jean Reno is wasted as are Mastroianni and Moreau. Peter Weller and Chiara Caselli show great charm. Kim Rossi Stuart and Inés Sastre are as charmless and at sea as Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin in Zabriskie Point. Sophie Marceau looks great, but her performance is deplorable. I broke out laughing when her character claimed to have stabbed her father twelve times. I was not convinced. Similarly, Fanny Ardant muffs her drunk scene. Lovers of Mr. Antonioni's work should see Beyond the Clouds, others may be baffled.