Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is Jane Schoenbrun's most successful and accomplished film to date. The 1980s inspired mise-en-scene from I Saw the TV Glow is repeated and elevated thanks to a first rate cast and knowingly cheesy special effects. Schoenbrun's themes of transgression, sexual fluidity, and dysmorphia are once again articulated, perhaps overly so. However, Schoenbrun's love for pop culture permeates and lifts the film. The artifacts of pop culture litter the film: 1980s horror film bespoke ephemera, KFC, and lots of brightly packaged candy. Sch💜enbrun 💙s them all, but she is ambivalent enough to fear what pop culture has done to our psyches and bodies. This is the Cronenbergian strain in their work and they toss in a Videodrome reference in acknowledgement.

Teenage Sex... is, of course replete with film references: Sunset Boulevard, Psycho, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc. Schoenbrun is savvy enough about her obsessive cinephilia to joke about an overly academic or meta approach to movies in the flick. Her surrogate in the film, Kris (Hannah Einbinder), is a rising queer indie filmmaker who wants to remake a beloved horror film of her youth. The final girl in that film was played by a young actress named Billy Presley who eventually disappeared from view. Now older and embodied by Gillian Anderson, she lives a reclusive existence living, holy Miss Havisham, in the abandoned set of the original Camp Miasma film. The mousy and frigid Kris visits Billy to talk her into participating in the new film. Einbinder reins in her charisma nicely and has a winning rapport with Anderson that papers over the film's flights of fantasy. Anderson is transfixing in full diva mode, Norma Desmond with the voice of Bette Davis. 

Billy gets Kris to loosen, plying her with grass and candy and serving as a sex therapist for the uptight younger woman. Eros and thanatos are at the core of the movie: the monster at the bottom of the lake who comes out to murder campers has an air vent shaped head, a shout out to Silent Hill, and is named "Little Death." The film posits that all one has to do to gain agency is repossess the male gaze and then liberation and orgasms will follow. This aged voice says it ain't necessarily so. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is entertaining on its own terms, but is overly enamored with its own artifice. I also thought it was too long. The satiric scenes of Hollywood players are overly broad and not particularly funny, but Schoenbrun could not resist nibbling the hand that feeds her. Still, I value the personal vision that lies at the heart of the film even if I find it a bit naive. The flirting between a Kwik-Mart clerk and an oblivious Kris is the kind of little touch that uplifts a cockeyed genre film like this.

Sea Devils

Sea Devils is a relative clunker from Raoul Walsh. The film is based on a minor Victor Hugo novel, but Borden Chase's screenplay takes many liberties with Hugo, history, and geography. The film is set around 1800 as a state of war exists between the British empire and Napoleonic France. Napoleon and his chief cop, Fouché, figure in the threadbare espionage plot which binds together smuggler Rock Hudson and British agent Yvonne De Carlo. They are chiefly responsible for the void at the center of this picture. Hudson is terrible, but Yvonne De Carlo is really terrible. I was a fan of The Munsters when I was a tot, so I won't belabor the point, but it is puzzling since she is quite good later on in Walsh's Band of Angels. Anyway, Hudson has more chemistry with Bryan Forbes, playing Rock's wingman, than he does with Ms. De Carlo.

Hudson functions best when he gets to display courtly gentility towards his leading lady. In Sea Devils, Rock kidnaps and gags his leading lady. This is a role for Errol Flynn not Hudson. Hudson never seems at ease in action films, even as late as 1969's The Undefeated he looks uncomfortable in the out of doors. Rock was more adept, both vocally and physically, indoors, as in the tavern brawls in Sea Devils, urbane flirting with Doris Day and with the late, lamented Susan Saint James on McMillan and Wife. On balance, he was also not a good fit for period roles. Despite the film's title, the picture spends little time at sea. Most of the picture is salon intrigue with gorgeous sets by Wilfred Shingleton (Great Expectations) shot in sublime Technicolor by Wilkie Cooper (Seven Men From Now). A good drinking game for this flick would be to have a shot every time Rock takes off his shirt.

Rock Hudson and Yvonne De Carlo

The exteriors for Sea Devils were shot in the Channel islands and France. That coupled with the all UK supporting cast lends one to think that this was a case of the fading RKO channelling European profits into a European production. The supporting players are certainly better than the leads, especially Jacques Brunius as Fouché, Maxwell Reed, and Denis O' Dea. Bryan Forbes said he was "ludicrous in a ludicrous movie", but he was only half right. Perhaps producer David E. Rose wanted to recapture elements of such recent Walsh triumphs as Captain Horatio Hornblower and The World in his Arms, but this is a pale facsimile. One interesting echo is a carrier pigeon sequence lifted straight out of Walsh's Desperate Journey. I find it more of an example of Hollywood as an echo chamber than as proof of the auteur theory.  

Ashkan, The Charmed Ring and other stories

Sina Razani

I feel that Shahram Mokri's Ashkan, The Charmed Ring and other stories is one of the more impressive feature film debuts of the 21st century. This 2008 release has had very little imprint in the US. It even lacks a Wikipedia page. The picture's IMDB page incorrectly lists it as a color film. It was shot digitally and then rendered into black and white with a few splashes of red. It is a discursive mystery with absurdist humor. The look of the picture matches the tone of the film which seeks to move beyond the then prevailing neorealism of Iranian cinema. The deadpan absurdist tone and manner of Ashkan was influenced, as Mokri has acknowledged, by the films of Hal Hartley and Jim Jarmusch. He has also cited the influence of Quentin Tarantino on Ashkan's script which, like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, plays with time and points of view.

The film leaps about, focusing on a myriad of strange characters whose tales intersect including two blind jewel thieves, two medical students trying to deal with a room full of cadavers, a representative of the police, and a winged sculpture. The titular Ashkan doesn't show up until halfway through the flick. That he is seeing his therapist denotes how Western the film is. Islamic fundamentalism is significant in its absence. The film has a hard bop soundtrack courtesy of Abuzar Saffarian and employs what sounds like a Farsi version of The Windmills of Your Mind for the conclusion. Ashkan is seeing his therapist after his fourteenth suicide attempt. His doc, understandably, terminates their professional relationship. Such is the warped and askew humor that permeates this film. Unlike some absurdist comedies, there are actual laughs that prevent the film from falling prey to artiness.

Ashkan is off-putting in its preposterousness and ramshackle in its production, but I could be describing Breathless. Ashkan is so efficiently shot and cut that its polyphonic saga whizzes by. My mouth was often agape at its visual simplicity and audacity. Unlike some adepts of post-modern clutter, Mokri injects enough heart along with the cleverness to engage the viewer emotionally. Like Godard, he is a devoted cinephile and that permeates his work. Mokri was initiated into the mysteries of the cinema by his father in a country where it sometimes dangerous to pursue that passion. As a lad, Mokri had his head shaved by the local authorities for possessing a VHS copy of a ninja movie. A long dialogue about Melville's Le Samouraï provides a bonding mechanism for two hoods and a way to invoke Mokri's father's favorite actor, Alain Delon. The cast of Ashkan, almost all of them theatrical veterans, enliven the film with arcane riffs and expert beats.

Fish and Cat

Ashkan, The Charmed Ring and other stories is part of a new box set by Deaf Crocodile entitled The Time-Bending Mysteries of Shahram Mokri. It incudes his three subsequent features: Fish & Cat, Invasion, and Careless Crime. Biff assures you all that this is one boffo box. Fish and Cat, from 2013, is a serial killer film that ignores the dictates of the genre. There is little gore and the killings around a vacation lake occur offscreen. Instead of an 85 minute quickie it is a discursive and circuitous 2 hours and 14 minutes. Time and perspective are played with as long tracking shots follow the twenty or so characters; mostly hip young students from Tehran. A difficult, but rewardingly immersive picture. The same could be said for Mokri's next feature, Invasion, a Sci-Fi picture of sorts with a vampiric alien feasting on humans. Earth, or at least Iran, is enveloped in darkness and smoke in this 2017 release.The compulsive and repetitive drama is enclosed, occurring almost entirely within a large building that is part college structure, part industrial maze. Invasion functions as a comment on the interiority of gaming. Once again the film is an endless series of tracking shots. As in Fish & Cat, the narrative loop becomes a Möbius strip. To further obfuscate, the characters are played interchangeably by the players. While this jibes with Mokri's absurdism, it also harkens back to Persian ritual dramas known as ta'ziyeh, which Mokri invokes at various points. There is an air of theatrical frivolity that contrasts with the dystopian plot. Invasion will reward multiple viewings.

Careless Crime was released in 2020. The schisms of Iranian life that were undercurrents in the previous films come to the fore as bumbling fundamentalists plot to torch a movie theater. Once again time and perspective shift continually. The action shifts from 2020 to 1979 and back. Yet, the song remains the same as the past is prologue to the future. There are films within the film within the film. Sometimes the satire is half baked, as in the fake feature within Careless Crime, but the cinephilia of the picture won me over. We visit a movie museum and even view an Edison short. Careless Crime is Mokri"s most conventional and mature work and bodes well for Black Rabbit, White Rabbit.