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[This post is part of Ten Days' Wonder, a Claude Chabrol blogathon, hosted by Flickhead]

Claude Chabrol's The Flower of Evil is a very deceptive film, but, given the story Chabrol's telling, it would sort of have to be, wouldn't it? At the center of the story -- and virtually the only characters in the whole film -- is the Charpin-Vasseur clan, a family with a highly scandalous past (and not much less scandalous present) that is made public when an anonymously written leaflet about the family -- detailing everything from unsolved murders to Nazi collaboration -- is distributed to the public in the wake of Anne Charpin-Vasseur's (Nathalie Bye) announcement that she's going to run for political office.

Anne's husband, Gerard (Bernard Le Coq), is very much against Anne's political ambitions, though his reasons for this are never made entirely clear. He's also serially unfaithful to Anne, which is one -- but only one -- of the reasons that his son Francois (Benoit Magimel), who has just returned home after four years in America, dislikes his father. This dislike is shared by his step-sister, Michele (Melanie Doutey), who is Anne's natural daughter. Her natural father, and Francois's natural mother, died together in a car accident years ago. They were, respectively, married to Anne and Gerard, and their deaths brought those two together, although the Charpins and the Vasseurs had always been very close over the years, and intermarriage had bonded the two for generations. The families are so close, in fact, that Francois and Michele have long harbored a non-familial love for each other, which Francois's return to France has rekindled.

Rounding out the characters, and joining Francois and Michele in their dislike of Gerard, is the elderly Aunt Line (Suzanne Flon). It was Aunt Line's father who was the victim of the unsolved murder mentioned in the leaflet, and Aunt Line herself was actually tried for the crime, though she was acquitted. Though Aunt Line dislikes Gerard, I got the impression that she did so for no reason more specific than because Gerard is so very unlikable; generally Aunt Line wants to simply get along, and wants her family to get along, and to be happy. Although it's not her political campaign that is in danger of being derailed, the leaflet may trouble Aunt Line the most, as it dredges up so much anguish that she hoped had been buried.

The Flower of Evil plays, at times, like a mystery, the central question being "Who wrote the leaflet?", but that isn't really what it is. What the film really seems to be trying to do is explain its title, and I mean that as a compliment. I think viewers can be forgiven for not having a complete understanding of all the backstory laid out by the leaflet -- which, we're told by Gerard, is "all true" -- but that's not terribly important. What is important is the knowledge that this family, or pair of families, has been laced with deviance and, yes, evil for decades. What can such a past do to future generations, even as those deficiencies would seem to have thinned out over the years?

Earlier, I referred to Francois and Michele as step-siblings, but in the film, at one point, Francois refers to Michele and himself as cousins, which would make their relationship fully incestuous, as opposed to only technically incestuous. I don't have the family tree completely clear in my own head, but if they are indeed cousins, then the fact that they don't hide their intimacy from their family, and that intimacy is not only accepted by the family, but in some cases actually embraced by them, becomes a little alarming. I'm told France is more permissive than the US in sexual matters, but this is really pushing it. Which is, finally, I believe, the point. The Charpin-Vasseurs are so terribly casual in their abnormalities. Francois and Michele are very likable (and also very well played by Doutey and Magimel, but then the high quality acting in this film is formidably consistent, with my own favorite performance coming from Le Coq -- his Gerard is so exquisitely, humanly awful), but the ease with which they slip into their relationship, and the happiness that Aunt Line takes in seeing them together, is faintly chilling.

Not just that, but when murder finally occurs, as you sort of know it will, and two characters are attempting to hide the body, at one point they lose their grip on the corpse, and both break into laughter. By this time in the film, there are a great number of moral complications and grey areas revolving around this crime, but if two more normal people had found themselves in the same awful situation, I don't think laughter would ever be a feature of their evening. It is for these two, though, because in the history of the Charpin-Vasseurs, violence runs deep, as does secrecy and sin. If they didn't laugh, they'd go crazy.

In a sense, I believe that Michele and Francois are the title characters. As the youngest generation of this diseased line, they are the ones who are most able to see all that is wrong around them and try to step back from it. But as I've said, they have their own problems, still inherited from their ancestors. If, perhaps, they could see past the ends of their own noses, and possibly try to, you know, not marry their own family members, they could have children who were still more cleansed than they are, and those children could have children, and on down the line. There could be a light at the end of the tunnel, maybe, but probably not the way these two are going about it.

On Insects

Insects are terrifying creatures. Or so they appear. Throughout recorded history, when faced with any species of insect at all, men -- and especially girls -- have regarded these tiny creatures with abject horror and maniacal violence. Why is this? Freud would say that it's because men and women regard insects as their own malevolent genitals, sprung from our collective ids, or "superegos", and bent on exposing our homosexuality to our parents. But this is only part of the truth, the other part being that insects are often pretty wicked looking. Personally, I find it disgusting that eight or nine years, depending, into this new millenium, mankind still judges the animal kingdom by its appearance, and it is my hope that, today, I can change our perceptions of the insect world. I want to turn our terror and disgust into joy and delight, our stomping and crushing into hugs and laughter. And I've studied all this shit, too, so if anybody can pull that off, it's me.

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Insects can be separated into three broad types. Those are Ants (which includes ants, beetles, earthworms, and millipedes); Scorpions (which includes scorpions, snakes, and alligators); and Flies (which includes all flying insects, such as bats, and all the beetles that don't count as ants). Each of these types contribute something positive to our daily lives. Ants, for example, eat all our grass. Scorpions keep the natives at bay, and provide poison for our spear- and arrow-tips. Flies gives our hard-working scientists and engineers ideas for future individual flight packs. Think about how you might one day be able to buzz your way to work like the care-free housefly, and the next time you go to squash one, I think you might find yourself thinking twice. Also, bees are flies, and bees give us honey. Honey is great. It's so good.

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Now, let us look at each type of insect. First, Ants. Ants are the kings, literally, of the Ant family, and there are three main kinds. The most famous and best kind of ant is the Black Ant, pictured below:

Black ants are the wisest of all insects, teaching all their minions how to hunt and fish, build homes and plant crops, even to carry items that weigh 1400 hundred times their own weight, which is hard to do, if you've never tried it. Think of it like this: You weigh one pound, okay? Now try to pick up a refrigerator that weighs 1400 pounds. That'll mess you up. And yet black ants can do it like it's nothing. Do you have any AAA batteries lying around? Go pick one of those up. See how easy that was? Okay, a black ant would find it just as easy to pick up something that weighed 1400 times that, or right around there, anyway. And yet we crush them under our boots every day!

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Red ants are often believed to be the natural enemy of the black ant, and in some ways that's true. Before I explain why, let's take a look at a red ant:

As you can see, red ants spend a lot of time around beautiful garden flowers, and, frankly, black ants wouldn't mind a little of that action themselves. So why not just do so, you might be asking, if black ants are the kings of insects? Because, hey, Einstein? How is a black ant supposed to blend in with beautiful flowers? How many black flowers have you seen? Not too many, I'll bet. But red flowers are all over the place, aren't they? So red ants can scamper amongst them as they please, while the black ants have to sit in the goddamn dirt, saying "You know what? Fuck those guys. Flowers are dumb." Sometimes this sort of denial works, but just as often it doesn't, and on those days, jealousy reigns, which in turn leads to those red ant/black ant fights you used to see in your backyard when you were a kid. That shit was nuts. At the time, you probably wondered what in the world red ants and black ants could possibly find to fight about. But now, thanks to me, you know that it's because of flowers.

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Next we have blue ants, seen below:
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In all honesty, you really probably should steer clear of blue ants. Those are some really bad motherfuckers. And if you see one -- and God, those things are everywhere these days! -- do not try to step on it. Being cast into the deepest caverns of Hell would feel like sinking into a warm bath in comparison to what that blue ant would do to you.

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On the other hand, every insect in the Scorpion category would make an excellent pet, should you ever wish to take your life in that direction. Humans who keep scorpions as pets are often looked down on as freaks, "weirdos", losers, terrifying loners, the kind of guy who puts up websites that claim that Stephen King is the one who shot John Lennon. And that's all true, as often as not, but why blame the scorpion? Look at him:

Isn't he beautiful? He's like a poisonous, scurrying little box of crayons. And his poison, so called, actually isn't poison at all, but a natural antibiotic that can be used to treat any number of infections. You don't even have to kill the scorpion to get it -- if he sees that you're not feeling well, he'll offer it to you. But actually, that particular type of scorpion is extinct. Most other scorpions really are pretty nasty, and I wouldn't get within ten feet of one if you paid me twenty dollars.

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Finally, we have Flies. Most humans consider flies, and other such creatures, to be the most aggravating of all insects. They fly around your food, bite you when you're outside, get all up in your face...but they mean nothing by any of that behavior, and most times they're pretty embarrassed about how everything went down. If we only shared a common language, we'd probably develop a pretty emotionally and intellectually satisfying relationship with them. As it happens, scientists, God bless 'em, are working right now to try and manipulate the vocal chords of humans, and the auditory senses and sensory communication capacity of flies, so that this beautiful dream can one day become a reality. We might be there right now, if it weren't for a tragic, yet fascinating, setback. About a week ago, a scientist named Dr. Leonard Barclay (pictured below) isolated himself in a Science Chamber with a lone housefly.

Dr. Barclay surrounded himself with lab equipment and potions -- everything he thought he might need to communicate with the fly. The potion (which was green) was intended, upon Dr. Barclay's consumption of it, to act as a conductor between one kind of lab equipment and Dr. Barclay, but unfortunately, like most science potions, it was full of sugar, and just as the scientist was lifting the beaker to his lips, the fly dove in.If the potion hadn't worked, there probably wouldn't have been a problem. The US government would have been down one housefly, but that's about it. Unfortunately, science once again "succeeded", and disaster enveloped Dr. Barclay in its icy cloak.

Needless to say, as soon as Dr. Barclay's colleagues could get their hands on a flamethrower, they burned him to ashes, because who wants that thing running around. But the potion works, which is the bright side of this whole deal. We are one step closer to being able to talk to flies. Thank you, Dr. Barclay.
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So ends tonight's lesson on our insect friends. I hope you've learned as much as I've tried to teach you. If you take away nothing else from this, please remember one thing: insects are beautiful. As beautiful as the hottest, most beautiful woman. But the thing is, insects aren't going to make you buy them dinner first! Right, fellahs? No, but seriously, don't kill insects if you can possibly avoid it. I mean, come on.

I'm Not What You'd Properly Call a Person

This is not a review.

I have about 30 pages left to read of Tony Burgess's bizarre, head-spinning, I-don't-know-what horror novel called Pontypool Changes Everything, and I simply don't know what to say. It's about a town in Ontario, called Pontypool, that is being devestated by a language-borne zombie plague (they're not zombies, strictly speaking, but that's what everyone calls them). The first half of the novel (titled Autobiography) focuses largely on the experiences of a mentally unstable high school drama teacher named Les Reardon, whose hallucinations add a sense of spatial, physical, and corporeal uncertainty to events that we know are actually supposed to be happening. The second half of the novel (titled Novel) deals with a drug-addicted teenager named Greg, who, through a crisis hotline, meets Grant, a perverted local news anchorman; and Julie and Jim, two children who flee from their home, due to the encroaching plague, and end up smack-dab in the middle of a Cormac McCarthy novel.

Burgess's prose is exceedingly surreal, even when it's entirely lucid, like in this passage, which describes overtaking of a police detective by the plague:

The detective is a foolish man, not smart or pleasant, so, while he becomes even less appealing in these last days of his life, an angel will be assigned to him: the soul of an innocent child whose murderer he brought to justice. The angel is assigned to him to remind us that we are tormenting a man who is loved by God.

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God and angels have virtually nothing to do with the rest of the novel, by the way, which somehow makes that passage more striking. But remember, that's the novel at its most clear, which it sometimes isn't, exactly. Check out this bit, which is part of an explanation of this word-plague, taken from a chapter called "Zombies Explained to Us":

It gestates in the deep structures prior to language. Or, at least, simultaneous with language. In the very primal structure that organizes us as differentiated, discontinuous copies of each other. The virus probably enters, in fact, among paradigmatic arrangements. And then, almost instantly, the virus appears in a concept of itself. This causes all sorts of havoc.

Well, I would think so!

I don't ordinarily do this before I've finished reading a book, but earlier today I went browsing for interviews with Burgess, to try and get a sense, from the horse's mouth, just what in the hell he was up to. And I found a good one, conducted by The Danforth Review. Here's an interesting exerpt.

TDR: I was trying to think of an adjective to describe your fiction, and I couldn't think of one that suited. Your work has elements of slasher films, post-apocalyptic nightmares, science fiction, horror, and high-minded literary styling in the vein of William S. Burroughs. In your work, zombies haunt small-town Ontario and the populace is infected by an language-borne virus. I see much of this as a metaphor for frightening unseen forces that may or may not be influencing our lives and our world. There's also much humour; I want to make sure I don't forget to say that. Were you surprised to find yourself writing stuff like this ... or has this always been your modus operandi? (and how do you make sense of it? what are you '"up to"? if that isn't too blunt and reductive a question).

TB: No, no surprise that I write like this. Oh wee. Each of the elements you mention matter to me...except, you mention metaphor in your question and I don't really think in terms of metaphor...it goes to this: metaphor is a device (distracting) for looking at this world, and usually about the experience of being a person. Well, neither of those things are particularly interesting to me. I'm not what you'd properly call a person. When I'm writing I grant myself exceptional powers. Sometimes I want to write in a substandard fashion but have the occulted ambition to physically change the immediate vicinity of the book. Now, you might say "so what? You're fuckin nuts!" but I'm now going to be curious to see what I end up writing. This is partially what I've learned from badly made horror films. There are places that realize the unrealizable. We just don't notice it because it looks like failure.

Do this: rent Phantasm or Tool Box Murders or something and suspend your disbelief like you never have before. Believe that it is the world, not an incompetent version. (You will, because it matters to you, believe that somewhere along the process you'll meet your world again anyway, right? So don't worry, metaphorization is a stable insidious program.) Then that forks off for me this other question: if I'm not making metaphors, then what exactly am I dragging back here? Here's an intense experience that yes, did happen in the world, but it is alien to the world, so please, what can we do with it? Put it this way: I came by those books I wrote honestly.

His dismissal of metaphor is actually a bit of a relief, because a blurb on the back of my copy of the novel says that Pontypool Changes Everything is positively bursting with the stuff (I'm paraphrasing), but I'll be damned if I know what this is all a metaphor of. Or for, I guess.

Anyway, Burgess seems like a pretty unusual guy, and although it doesn't necessarily follow that such a person would write a pretty unusual book, that's what he's done. It is, I suppose, a horror novel, though it doesn't really feel like one. It feels like an experiment, or maybe just a series of images that Burgess could only justify to himself by welding them to a pseudo-horror plot. Though even "plot" seems like the wrong word.

Pontypool Changes Everything was recently adapted (script by Burgess) into a film called, simply, Pontypool, and it's currently playing On Demand, so I'll be catching it shortly. That should sure be something. In the meantime, I'll try to remember what Burgess says later in that interview linked to above, regarding how he'd like to imagine people finding his book:

I like to think of someone finding the book in a cabin where they're staying, shoved on a small book shelf with five other books. In time, they are forced to read it and when they come back to work they can't forget this unsound little read and finally have to ask somebody, "have you ever heard of this...?" and the somebody says "no" and the person spends weeks trying to privately shake this book that, as time goes by, they're not sure they ever read at all.

I can absolutely see that happening.

20 Seconds to Leave

Gaspar Noe's I Stand Alone is no Taxi Driver, however desperately Noe might wish it was, but for much of its length it's a reasonably effective knock-off. Philippe Nahon (pictured above, in a contemplative moment) is very good as The Butcher, an unemployed, middle-aged man whose turbulent history up to the point of the film's beginning is recounted in uninflected, yet sardonic narration, while a Nazi-esque march plays in the background. His rage at the world is both putrid and banal, though his banality may not necessarily reflect badly on Noe, as the sort of man we're dealing with in I Stand Alone, as they exist in the real world, are hardly the deepest of thinkers.

So okay: I thought the film worked, for the most part, and Noe's preferred method of arist-to-audience communication -- shocking sex and violence -- spreads the existential sleaze on just thickly enough. But I want to focus exclusively (and very briefly, as I'm back home now, and completely wiped out) on one moment that really drove me up the wall. With about fifteen minutes to go, a title appears on screen that says, roughly, Warning! You have 20 seconds to leave the theater. Danger! Then we get a countdown to the film's big, shocking climax, which then shocks us, and then the movie's over.

There are a couple of things that are supremely obnoxious about this bit of self-congratulatory post-modernism. One is that it drops its post-modernism into the middle of a film that primarily shoots for a naturalistic tone (with some mild exceptions). In that sense, the title card merely doesn't work, which is excusable. Less excusable is that it exposes Noe as someone who positively adores his own transgressions, and who seeks to shock his audiences so that he can pat himself on the back for his bravery and honesty. As if that wasn't enough, the title card -- like the rewind scene in Michael Haneke's Funny Games -- also saps his climax of nearly all of its natural, visceral power. While Nahon's performance (as well as that of Blandine Lenoir, with whom Nahon shares the end of the film) saves some of that power from draining away completely, an actor can only do so much repair work after the director has announced to the world that he doesn't care about his characters.

Shock, as a means to an end, and developed organically in the story, is perfectly fine by me. But shock as the point in and of itself, accompanied by a smirk, is extremely offensive to me. And its offensive as an artistic philosophy, moreso than any of the images that philosophy tries to rub my nose in. Its like telling a dead baby joke and then chastising those who couldn't "handle" it.

Oops!

I probably should have mentioned that I've been out of town, and therefore largely off-line, since Friday. I hope nobody was too worried. I haven't been murdered or anything, so everybody calm down.

Until I return to my normal daily rut, allow me to offer a hearty Happy Father's Day to all you Dads out there (and to my own, to whom I've said this is person, but it would still be wrong not to include him).

But I offer those sentiments sincerely, on behalf of myself, as well as everybody's favorite movie stepdad, Harry Powell.

Now go watch golf, or whatever!

I Wanted to See How it Worked

If you're still reading this blog at 10:00 AM Eastern Time, you're out of your flippin' head! You should be over at Flickhead's place, voicing your thoroughly considered opinion of this month's TOERIFC film, Henry Jaglom's Someone to Love. Now git!

UPDATE: Er...ignore that whole "10:00 AM" business. The discussion is going on now...!

Yeeeessss....

Release date Sept. 8, 2009. More information here.

This is my favorite film that Mamet has ever directed, and that's saying something. It's a fascinating, strange, gripping thriller, with an ending that is both hard to swallow, and dead-on perfect, which is a pretty neat trick. It's never been on DVD before, so if you haven't seen it, your chance is fast approaching. I can't wait.