KWIF: The Bride! (+2)

KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. I feel like I've fallen off a cliff with my movie watching this month. I'm a little aimless. Blank Check is covering Peter Weir and I'm not all that psyched about following along. My delve into the "Tales for all" series feels like I've hit a wall a bit (although this week's feature may have somewhat re-invigorated my enthusiasm) and the theatres are in just a slight lull (but this week's back with two films I'm very excited about seeing). Maybe it's just the winter blahs and spring tease that's toying with me (the one hour time change also fucked me up for a week, we need to knock this daylight savings b.s. right off), or maybe it's the horror show going on outside cinema that's proving escape mighty hard. Anyway, I forced the issue and thus is the result....

This Week:
The Bride! (2026, d. Maggie Gyllenhaal - in theatre)
2:22 (2018, d. Paul Currie - Tubi)
Vincent and Me (aka "Vincent et moi" - "Tales for all #11" - 1990, d. Michael Rubbo - Crave)

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A little over three months ago we got a luscious and epic (and multiple Academy Award-winning) Frankenstein movie from Guillermo Del Toro, but this was film that was rooted in adaptation, reverence and Gothic tragedy. It's a film that took Mary Shelley's novel, Bernie Wrightson's illustrations, and a romanticized view of Gothic style and architecture and created a delicious salmon ball of a movie that might not be to everyone's tastes, but it's not meant to be...it's 100% catering to its director's sensibilities and anyone familiar with Del Toro's past work can tell it is most definitely the film he wanted to make, and he'd been thinking about making it for a long, long time.

Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride is not really an adaptation. The titular "bride" in The Bride of Frankenstein, James Whale's 1935 follow-up to his previous movie, is not much of a character to speak of in that film, appearing only in the climax of said film. Anyone using the Bride of the Monster in the 90 years since doubtlessly owes something to Whale's film, but any story where the Bride is a character must then be largely a construct of its writer.

Though perhaps not adapting anything particular, Gyllenhaal, writing and directing here, clearly shows her reverence for Whale's pictures, Shelley's novel, and the popular genres of the 1930's cinema... the gangster pieces and the song-and-dance films. If anything, The Bride! owes its biggest debt to Bonnie and Clyde, which I've never seen, and even I know it's the framework for everything here.

The film opens with a black screen, and a voice. In stark black and white we see the face of Mary Shelley, as played by Jessie Buckley who informs us that she's been trapped, in a void for some time, and she may have found her way out... a way out through story. Buckley speaks in a rapid fire, rambling nature as Shelley, delivering a monologue that's chaotic and somewhat nonsensical, but the gist comes through. We transition to a mid-30's Chicago restaurant where Ida (Buckley) is cavorting with a couple of mob goons, along with some other girls. She's clearly not in a good space, but then she eats an oyster and starts convulsing. Shelley starts taking control. There's a dual-brained nature to the performance, with Shelley's chaos and Ida's confusion, and it leads to her flapping her gums about the big boss-man Lupino's (Zlatko Burić) vile business. She gets pulled outside and it's...unclear if she is pushed down the stairs or if it's Shelley's influence that makes her fall.

We transition to Frank, the child of Frankenstein, a hundred year old monster in appearance only, but the manners of a gentleman and the enthusiasm of an Amish kid on Rumspringa. He loves song and dance romances, and is terribly lonely. He has made it to Chicago to meet Dr. Euphronius (Annette Benning), a mad scientist type who has picked up Frankenstein's legacy in investigating life after death. Frank fascinates her endlessly, but he wants only one thing from her, to build him a companion. And so they dig up the freshest body they can find - Ida, of course - and resurrect her (Frank resists initially..."too pretty" he says, but Dr. Euphronius is too keen to see if she can do it).

She emerges with no solid memories, but a sense of self, and, also the guiding voice of Shelley in her head (and sometimes outside of it as well). This new bride for Frank is everything he's not...gregarious and outgoing, unabashed and liberated (can't help but think that Poor Things had a bit of influence on this portrayal), but Shelley's voice and mind still wrests control from time to time, and her diatribes become even more chaotic and nonsensical.

It's a choice.

In Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein, he opens his film with a metatextual scene where Mary Shelley decides to regail her husband Percy and their friend and host Lord Byron with the "what happens next" after the end of Frankenstein (though it should be noted that Shelley here is recounting what happens after the end of the previous movie and not her novel, as The Bride of Frankenstein is predominantly built out of parts of the novel unused in the earlier movie). The actress playing Mary Shelly also plays the Bride of the Monster in the film, and it seems like the metatext of that movie as well as the dual role of Shelly and the Bride sparked Gyllenhaal's imagination and informed much of her approach to the character(s) Buckley plays here.

Gyllenhaal goes for broke stylistically here, with more than a couple of dance numbers that blur the line between what's actually happening and fantasy. There's violence, with Ida facing the groping hands of assailants no less than three times, and all the assailants get their comeuppance in very quick order. The violence begets lust and romance between her and Frank, as they flee the police (including Detectives Wiles and Malloy played by Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz respectively) across the Northeast. The unfortunate element of all this is that Frank gaslights her the entire way (starting with naming her "Penelope... Pretty Penny"). Yes, gentlemanly and a protector, but also a liar with his own incel agenda to have a woman love him and keep her loving him forever.

It turns out that Wiles has a history with Ida, and it comes back to an investigation on Lupino who is under suspicion of having murdered dozens of missing women, and who the crooked law has been paid to overlook. 

The Bride! has character-based threads, story-based threads, and style-based threads to it which all weave together, but only loosely. It's not able to hold much weight. The performances are all pretty incredible. Buckley shows why she's a worthy Oscar-winner (she's been a powerful force in everything I've seen her in), and Bale turns in a surprisingly likeable but also frustrating performance as the Monster. Benning is in peak supporting actor form, and together Sarsgaard and Cruz make an unlikely but winning pair. And Jake Gyllenhaal's scenes are largely separate from the rest of the cast as he plays an early talkies singing-and-dancing big screen idol and you could almost swear it's straight from the era.

The stylistic choices Maggie Gyllenhall makes are bold. I mean, the mid-30's setting lends itself to a particular style, and the deviations from that style in set design, makeup and wardrobe are largely phenomenal. But it's more the choices, where music is anachronistic more often than not, and Gyllenhall doesn't shy away from huge winks to the audience (there's a big song and dance number to a thumping rendition of "Puttin' on the Ritz", and the film ends with... "The Monster Mash" playing over the credits. Seriously). Ida, at one point, incites a Pussy Riot-esque meme like trend for girls and women to rebel, adopting her chaotic hairstyle, her ink-stained face and lips, and the black tongue. Women run wild on the streets, gangs of them, tired of all the shit they have to face. It's surreal, unreal, and a surprisingly delightful bit of fantasy to imagine that the patriarchy (of that era, or any era for that matter) wouldn't (or couldn't) just smack that shit down with brutal force. 

But the film, if it's trying to be inspirational and feminist, falters quite a bit, especially in the fact that it wants to have its cake and sit on it too. Gyllenhaal wants her husband playing Detective Wiles and her friend playing Frank to be seen, ultimately, as good guys.  So Wiles has his redemption, and Frank, even after Ida's found out he's been gaslighting her all this time, still gets a "but I love him" signal from his non-Bride which seemed antithetical to the whole purpose of the film. And the gangster sub-plot, the origin story of The Bride in this film, it gets resolved in a mid-credits scene.

The Bride! is not perfect, and its inconsistencies make it less than satisfying, but at the same time it is far from boring and it really has some special elements to it. I think the whole Shelley-possessing-Ida angle is what needs the most consideration upon rewatch, but I just haven't decided yet if it'll be worth rewatching.

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The idea of "burden of choice" is not new, especially when it comes to movies. In the thirty year glory period of movie rentals pre-Netflix, I could often be found roaming around a video store for upwards of an hour trying to decide upon a movie or two (or three) to take home for the night. These days, if I don't have an agenda when I sit down to relax for the evening (or on a lazy weekend morning) then I can be found spending that same almost-hour just jumping around from streaming service to streaming service looking at "cover" images and reading descriptions and maybe taking in 15-second previews. The experience of browsing can be as entertaining as actually watching something.  

Tubi really is the closest approximation to the video store experience. There are quality, big-name, titles, box office hits (and near misses), but there's also piles upon piles upon piles of low-budget, never-heard-of-it goodness that stretches back into the 1970s and maybe even before. It's a bevvy of delights for the trash aficionado.  

Low budget movies aren't the same as they used to be though. There are entire studios and/or distribution houses that fund and assemble the glut as packages to sell to streaming services or cable services internationally. If there's money to be made it's not going to the filmmakers, and a lot of them know it, producing movies where perhaps there's effort but not any care or pride. The majority of low-budget filmmaking from the past 25 years feels...soulless.

So when scroll across something like 2:22 , where it has the usual glossy highly photoshopped poster that looks like every other poster and the requisite "hey that guy (or gal)" star, regardless of the film's enticing high-concept-that-it-cannot-possibly-deliver-on-description I usually just have to turn away. But something in me decided to give this one the rare 5-minute shot... the coveted 300 seconds to impress me or I'm getting out, never to return.

Inside, I found a familiar lead (Michiel Huisman, Orphan Black, The Flight Attendant, The Haunting of Hill House) and a surprisingly creative bit of editing as well as a deft use of effects budgeting.  Huisman plays Dylan, an air traffic controller, with a gift for spotting patterns. As he makes his way to and from his apartment to Grand Central Station every day on his bicycle (it's funny how typing it out, "bicycle" seems so juvenile, but if I were to write "bike" you would probably assume motorcycle) via his train to and from the airport, he starts to see patterns, especially at the station. The movie telegraphs where this is all going with an opening flash...back? forward? sideways? to a guns-drawn standoff in the station.

Then one day at work Dylan begins having a weird...seizure maybe that causes him to sort of blip out of focus for a few seconds, and in that few seconds there's a near-collision on the runway that he manages to save the day on... but he still gets suspended. He's at a "sky-ballet" event where he finds himself transfixed by Sarah (Teresa Palmer, definitely not Kristen Stewart), an art gallery curator, and as they meet they become aware that she was on one of the flights that almost crashed. And they share the same birthday. There's kismet between them that neither can deny. They're both floating on air after just one evening of talking to each other.

But as the days go on, and the patterns become stronger, Dylan starts to become a bit more unglued. Reality is not this precise in its repetitive behaviour, and it's all a bit too intense for him. At the gallery opening Sarah's been working on for her ex-boyfriend, digital mixed-media artist Jonas, (Sam Reid, definitely not Michael C. Hall) one of the centrepieces is a digital recreation of Grand Central, and of the repeating patterns Dylan has been seeing. A fight ensues and things sour with Sarah.

Dylan tries to keep his composure but he goes slightly bonkers with what the world's telling him, only to find other clues in his apartment that lead him to understand what's going on.

It really is a pretty slickly produced movie that has the sensibilities of a 90's mid-budget thriller that would have starred, I dunno, Andy Garcia and Julia Roberts, or Bruce Willis and Andie MacDowell. It has that big-star sheen and polish to it, just without the big stars. That doesn't mean it's good, though, much like most thrillers of the mid-90's.

It's not that there's a logic flaw to the supernatural element to this movie, it all comes together, it's just that the mystery, once it really starts to get solved, is pretty pedestrian. I guess the genre nerd in me wanted more of a sci-fi explanation than a fantasy one.

It also would have helped had the film not been telegraphing its finale so prevalent throughout the film. The idea is that history is repeating itself and once we understand that there's so little drama when we understand what the finale has to be (and some of us may get there faster than others, but most of us will be ahead of the movie on this one).

There are three editors on this film (William Hoy, Sean Lahiff, Gary Woodyard) and it's easy to see why it took three people to pull this together. Not only are the sort of time-flashes pretty intensely cut, there are also the montages of repeating patterns (this was sooo close to being a time loop movie, but it isn't at all) that looked like they took a lot of work to assemble, and then there's the fact that they shot this movie in Sydney but it's set in New York and Grand Central Station is at the very core of every aspect of this film. Shooting, editing, and blending with effects the scenery and backgrounds must have been an absolute chore, and I was astonished at how well it worked. I mean, I knew it couldn't be New York City, and so I spent a lot of time trying to see where the seams were and I failed over and over (I'm also not *that* familiar with NYC).

This is a film everyone involved can be quite proud of even if it's not as successful as was likely hoped for. It's not quite a hidden gem, but it is a quality production.

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If producer Rock Demers is the literal rock of the "Tales for all" series, the solid foundation upon which this house is built, then Australian writer-director Michael Rubbo is the I-beam across the center that keeps the framework stable. He is the writer-director of The Peanut Butter Solution and Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveler, not just the two most ambitious of the "Tales for all" but also probably the two most memorable (I was going to say "most successful" but I really don't know what is the appropriate measure for success on these movies which are Quebecois treasures and notable for being staple viewing on CBC in the 80's and 90's).

Rubbo returns for a third outing with Demers and did not leave any ambition behind. With Vincent et moi/Vincent and Me, Rubbo was engaging with his love of art in his screenplay via the character of Jo (Nina Petronzio), a young teen who travels from her rural town to attend a Montreal arts school. She is a Van Gogh obsessive, just idolizes his work (there is a back story there). She is an exceptional artist, though all her form is in impersonating her idol, both in how she paints and sketches. 

On the train to school, a young lad, Felix, tries to make friends, but she's standoffish and just wants to read her book on Van Gogh. Arriving at art school she learns he is the director of the school play. Her teacher is excited by her arrival, as she's seen her talent, and gives the class an assignment: design a jungle backdrop for the school play. Jo is immediately taken aback... she only draws and paints real life, she has no imagination (her words). Her teacher doesn't believe her. Felix pays a visit and brings a book of Henri Rousseau's jungle paintings. The next day Jo show's off her new backdrop, which is a near-perfect replica of a Rousseau. Her teacher catches her in a lie saying it was an original work, and Jo flips the fuck out.

It seems clear that this stage setting is all about Jo having to learn and grow as an artist and as a person, to accept the friendship and input of others while also discovering her own imagination as she blossoms into womanhood. I mean, we've seen at least three other similar films like this in the "Tales for all" series so ...

wait...

To calm herself down Jo runs around Montreal on her own trying to sketch people but they keep moving. She manages to sketch one lean, elderly gentleman with a pointy beard... only when she goes to leave he grabs her by the coat and drags her through a parade to a Chinese restaurant where he demands to see the drawing she made of him. He is immediately impressed, not just impressed, but astonished. He buys the drawing off her for a crisp $50 Canadian bill and requests he meet her back there the next day with a painting of her rural farm life.  Felix has been following her, and warns her that the thin man is shifty business.

Fast forward to the end of the school year and the performance of Felix's play (really, genuinely beautiful sets...awful play with a blunt "save the rainforests" message) when Jo's teacher shows her a magazine article where her drawings have been passed off as newly discovered drawings of a 13-year-old Van Gogh. Jo tries to hide her displeasure, but when pressed, she tells what happened, and she's accused of being a liar again. She flips out and starts flipping chairs. The rage issues in this young lady.

Of course, now she has to learn lessons in humility and to accept things which are beyond her cont... nope her and Felix and a reporter are off to Amsterdam to reclaim her drawings.  There they meet Joris (Paul Klerk), a boy of their age who lives on a wee boat and knows Amsterdam inside out. He's on the hunt for the thieves who recently stole a Van Gogh painting. Jo is smitten and Joris acts like he has foreign girls swooning over him all the time. Felix is jealous.

The kids become detectives investigating some leads and they not only find the stolen painting but uncover a forgery scheme as well. It's only by narrow fortune that they manage to escape the wrath of the thin man. Unfortunately for them, the reward and glory for their discovery goes to the reporter who manages to figure out from context clues the kids mistakenly give him. Not only is Joris not getting his hard fought reward, but Jo isn't getting her drawings back.

Well, I guess this act of international intrigue can only go one place, which is teaching Jo and other kids that sometimes life is unfair and disap....

Or, Jo just literally astral projects back into 1880's Arles France where she meets her hero, Van Gogh (Tchéky Karyo, Goldeneye). He's pretty standoffish with this young intruder as he's trying to work, but they wind up having a real conversation where she tells him of his legacy (which he doesn't believe in the slightest until he starts picking up from context clues that she's truly not from this time). He gives her a lesson in his painting style (something clearly Rubbo is versed in, as he did many of the fake paintings in this film himself) and sends her back to her real time with one of his paintings.

And when she wakes up, yep, there's a Van Gogh sitting right there. She could be a millionaire, but all she wants is her sketches back. So, in voice over montage she tells of trading the painting for her drawing to the Japanese businessman that bought them, and then wraps up any other loose ends in the montage. 

Oh, lest we forget, the film opens with Jeanne Clement, the record holder for being the oldest living person ever validated, having passed away in 1997 at 122 years old. She was 115 when she appeared in this film, retelling her experience of having met Van Gogh in Arles when she was 13 or so. She said he was rude to her and probably drunk. 

I suspect the story from Clement came out probably around the time they were shooting this film in Amsterdam, or perhaps before and maybe inspired Rubbo in writing the tale? Either way, they managed to finagle an interview with Clement, which starts with her recounting her Van Gogh encounter, and ends with young Nina Petronzio talking with Clement in-character as Jo, telling Clement that she encountered Van Gogh and he was very nice. Poor Jeanne Clement seemed so damned confused by this conversation and the encounter and ...I dunno, it felt a little mean spirited, like some sort of Borat shit. I don't think she understood what was happening.

Vincent et Moi is a largely English language film (occasional French or Dutch with subtitles), and the young  cast's performances are a little choppy from the outset. The film feels weighted in its first act, likely because all the budget was spent or earmarked for shooting in Amsterdam, so the early scenes feel rushed and a bit sloppy. Amsterdam, though, is a blast. Not just for the scenery (despite this not being an very well shot film) but the performances and just the tone of the film changes to another gear. It's not until the shorter third act where Jo meets Van Gogh that the truly bonkers nature of the film and its structure are fully revealed. Karyo has been an impeccable European character actor for decades and this early appearance he's so handsome and charming, if maybe not so close to the usual portrayal of the painter. The scenery here shows Rubbo's love and care for art as he recreates through scenery or sets some of Van Gogh's works and, while not the most high-end of cameras and film printing, they're still gorgeous images.

The only disappointment I truly have with Vincent et moi is that Jo isn't more autism spectrum encoded. Here rage issues, her hyperfocusing, her lack of understanding social norms or her ability to read the emotions of others. It's all there, but it's clear it's not intentionally a "coded" performance. 

This is a delightfully bananas film. I never thought anything could dethrone The Peanut Butter Solution as my favourite "Tales for all", given my deep nostalgia for that film, but this one's making a play for it.  It's a weird, wild gem.