Capone's Art-House Round-Up with SWISS ARMY MAN, the Frank Zappa doc EAT THAT QUESTION, OUR KIND OF TRAITOR, and BELLADONNA OF SADNESS!!!

Hey, folks. Capone in Chicago here, with a few films that are making their way into art houses or coming out in limited release around America this week (maybe even taking up one whole screen at a multiplex near you). Do your part to support these films, or at least the good ones…


SWISS ARMY MAN
The first film by Daniels (the collective banner under which acclaimed music video directors Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan work) almost feels like a dare. In the beginning, it’s daring us to like it at all. And by the end, it’s daring us not to get emotional about its endearing characters and their newfound joy about living. SWISS ARMY MAN is a collection of things we don’t talk about or do in polite company—farting, vomiting (mostly water, but still), masturbating, suicide, falling in love with a stranger, things we dispose of (like garbage or people who don’t have a place in the world)—thrown together into a story about two men who must relearn what it is like to be alive. One of them is a corpse; the other has just given up on life. But by the end, this movie made me feel better than I’ve felt in ages after a movie, and it’s a feeling that has lingered in the months since I first saw it at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

SWISS ARMY MAN opens with an attempted suicide—cheery, I know. Hank (Paul Dano) simply doesn’t fit in, and according to him, he can’t find anyone to love him. As he’s about to hang himself on a deserted island where he’s trapped, he spots a dead body recently washed up on the nearby shore. The rather gaseous corpse (played by Daniel Radcliffe) seems to be super-charged with fart power, enough that Hank can climb on his back, pull the body’s pants down a bit, and ride the farting machine like a jet ski back to the mainland. Still lost, but at least somewhere somewhat familiar, Hank wanders an expansive forest, dragging this body with him.

After unlocking some more of this wondrous body’s abilities (including turning it into a human water fountain by pressing on its stomach and forcing water out of its mouth), Hank discovers that the body has limited speech abilities, and pretty soon the corpse reveals its name, Manny. Manny has no recollections of being alive or what living humans even do or feel, and the film becomes an exercise in making sense of everyday behaviors, thoughts and feelings and then conveying those to a being that is so eager and desperate to be “normal” that he often over-compensates.

But the deeper we get into Manny’s education, the more is revealed about Hank’s life before being stranded, which was no picnic, especially in the company of his overbearing, berating father who made him feel like such a loser than he stripped Hank of any chance at being able to communicate with anyone to whom he felt a connection, especially women. One woman in particular, Sarah (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), is the object of many wonderful feelings and dating scenarios that will likely never play out. But Manny is convinced that he, too, loves Sarah and insists that Hank teach him how he could approach her and what their dating life would be. Never going halfway, Hank not only lays out these hypothetical situations; he acts them out with sets, props and costumes made from the trash scattered around the woods. And it’s in these re-enactments of scenes that never actually occurred that SWISS ARMY MAN walks the lines between comedy, drama and fantasy.

Daniels never quite confirm or deny the fact that this entire story is taking place in Hank’s head, perhaps creating the fiction of a dead-body best friend to keep him from going insane; or perhaps he’s dreaming these things as he starves to death; or maybe these are a collection of his final thoughts as he successfully hung himself. We never know for sure, and in the end, it doesn’t really matter because however we interpret this fable, the themes don’t really change. This is about a man digging himself out of raw despair by filling this empty shell of a person with as much raw material about life as he can, and in the process he learns how to better express himself with his words (and his own farting, at times).

As they often did in the music videos, Daniels find mind-blowing ways to dazzle us with their visuals, particularly as they pertain to using Manny’s body as an all-purpose tool, weapon, means of transportation, and puppet, for entertainment purposes. In another example of making the audience feel just a little awkward, when Manny gets aroused, his erection (still in his pants, thankfully), points them in the direction of civilization, and its this unique brand of compass that ultimately is their greatest tool toward reaching the world again.

SWISS ARMY MAN is a love story, buddy picture, road movie and action film—there’s a bear attack sequence that is nearly as engaging as the one in THE REVENANT. Much like Manny, it’s all-purpose. If you’re in a good mood, it’s a tremendously funny comedy; if you’re feeling down, you’ll likely appreciate its therapeutic qualities. Or if you’re tired of the same sort of formula film, trust me, this one is so far afield from anything you’ve seen before, that it might reset your benchmark for how creative a film must be for you to enjoy it.

Radcliffe and Dano are an impossibly wonderful pairing. Both have shed any pretense of maintaining their dignity through the making of this movie, and we’re all better for it. But they have a chemistry that makes it very easy to accept them as best friends with notable agendas on what they need from the other to achieve a certain degree of happiness. Radcliffe is especially noteworthy since Manny is effectively a creature capable of only slight vocal variations, no independent gestures and limited facial expressions. Yet somehow, the former Harry Potter manages to convey a range of emotions despite having nearly all the tools of acting taken from him.

Bonding Manny and Hank still deeper is the gift of music. Nearly all of the music cues in SWISS ARMY MAN are sung by or a riff on tunes one or both of our heroes sing to themselves as they explore their surroundings. Also, the use of the Jurassic Park theme will make you grin for days and miles.

As the prospect of finding the real world becomes more of a likelihood, Hank begins to panic, and Manny starts to have visions that are both haunting and deeply rooted in his emotional instability. Their hopes and fears seem to sync up momentarily, and the result is a pressure cooker of emotions.

Make no mistake, SWISS ARMY MAN’s mission to have you celebrate your own life. But it’s not simply going to hand you a happy ending; any good feelings you have by the time the end credits begin to roll are hard earned. The filmmakers are going to remind you of every missed opportunity you had for happiness and didn’t take before they begin presenting you with possible ways of building your confidence and good vibes back up. It sounds like work, but most good things come to us as the result of work.

Like the best offerings from filmmakers like Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, SWISS ARMY MAN is the work of visionaries who possess both a sense of humor and a profoundly clear sense of what makes us function as feeling creatures, influenced by those who raised us and often in desperate need of course correction. At the halfway point of 2016, this is one of my favorite films of the year.


EAT THAT QUESTION: FRANK ZAPPA IN HIS OWN WORDS
I won’t pretend I have ever quite bought into the music of Frank Zappa (with or without his band, The Mothers of Invention), and god knows, I’ve attempted to. But my standard for whether a music documentary is worth seeing or not doesn’t have much to do with whether I’m a fan of the artist or style of music being profiled. My criterion is simple: if the film convinces me that its subject is worth exploring, I’m on board. And first-time feature director Thorsten Schütte’s EAT THAT QUESTION: FRANK ZAPPA IN HIS OWN WORDS is a captivating collection of archival footage that give us prime examples of Zappa’s recorded music, live shows and spoken ideas that add a great deal of depth to a musician who confounded so many and opened up and artfully warped the conventions of 20th century music in a way that today seems vital and necessary.

Never deflecting the label of “genius,” Zappa seemed to make music as if someone dared him to, often infusing complicated rock song structure with explicit lyrics. Later in his career, he’d often turn to politics as his muse, which resulted in a type of avant-garde protest music. He was also a dedicated classical composer and conductor, as well as a front-line soldier in the battle for free speech when Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center were threatening to slap warning labels on albums with sexual or violent content. Zappa’s Congressional testimony against such a system of labeling (which ultimately did happen) are reasoned and well argued, so of course he was destined to be ignored.

If you only ever caught Zappa in small doses over the decades, he was a bit difficult to figure out, often coming across as a curmudgeon and knee-jerk contrarian (it didn’t help that the parade of people interviewing him were often idiots attempting to label him to his face—something he clearly deplored). By immersing us in his life and music, EAT THAT QUESTION allows us to form a more complete picture of Zappa through some quite rare archival material. Director Schütte doesn’t bother identifying song titles or any timeframe for what we’re watching. Often, it’s only Zappa’s hair style that provides context, and this can be frustrating for those of us trying to spot the progression and evolution in his music.

There are also no new interviews with family members, fans or current musicians who were influenced by Zappa’s approach to melody. We don’t really require the adoration; Zappa probably wouldn’t have approved of such swooning. Although the film was sanctioned and approved by the Zappa family, there’s hardly a place where meddling might have occurred. The musician seems as appropriately and unabashedly unedited, unapologetic and critical of the establishment as you might hope.

As you might expect, the film dabbles in specific songs and albums that brought Zappa the most notoriety, but since those interviewing him seemed more interested in getting him riled up, the emphasis of the film is more general. The exception being some of his classical compositions, which are detailed quite extensively, and we see a far more positive and excited Zappa when he’s surrounded by a full orchestra.

Much like its subject, EAT THAT QUESTION is ragged, unadorned, without polish, but there’s a wisdom and sense of genius that rises through the muck, and as strange as it might sound, it’s easy to love. Perhaps the most shocking part of the film is the few clips of Zappa in his final months, when he’s exhausted and showing signs of the prostate cancer that ultimately killed him. He’s almost without spirit in these interviews, but the wicked sense of humor remains, as he claims that he has no interest in what his legacy might be. The movie lacks the usual pedestal placement of its subject, but it in no way feels disrespectful. Quite the contrary, the slightly detached aura of the work feels appropriate and allows the music and the ideas to take center stage. I’m fairly certain that’s all Zappa ever wanted.


OUR KIND OF TRAITOR
In the wake of the far superior AMC series “The Night Manager” or more recent film adaptations such as TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY and A MOST WANTED MAN, John le Carré’s novels are revealing themselves to be as relevant and intriguing today as they were in the 1960s and ’70s. But they can’t all be winners, as is evidenced by OUR KIND OF TRAITOR, an intriguing story about a young(ish) British couple who befriend a Russian mobster and get pulled into a world of spies, politics and treachery. And despite all of that and a little bit of globe-hopping to boot, the film falls flat and seems second tier, at best.

Ewan McGregor plays Perry, on vacation with wife Gail (Naomie Harris, James Bond’s Miss Moneypenny) in Marrakech. The couple is not getting along well, as she is always answering her phone to deal with work issues, and he’s being generally uninteresting as a teacher of poetry. When he is in a restaurant alone, Perry is approached by a wild and crazy Russian named Dima (Stellan Skarsgård), who ends up showing Perry the night of his life, drinking and gambling, both in the company of beautiful women. By the end of their trip, Dima has asked Perry to take a small package with him back to the UK, and Perry, of course, gets caught in customs.

Perry was caught because MI6 has had their eye on Dima for some time. Agent Hector (Damian Lewis) seems especially obsessed with bringing down Dima’s money-laundering scheme, which involves the Russian mafia bringing cash into Britain through legal channels and financial institutions with the help of paid-off government officials, including powerful player Aubrey Longrigg (Jeremy Northam).

Adapted by the fine screenwriter Hossein Amini (Drive, Snow White and the Huntsman), OUR KIND OF TRAITOR takes the admittedly unusual approach of turning civilians Perry and Gail, as well as Dima himself, into spies for MI6 in order to coax out exactly which Russian and British types are a part of this scheme. In return, Dima and his family will get witness protection in England. Lewis is especially fine here as the agent who will promise anything—even things he knows he can’t deliver—just to bust up this ring. He has a particular vendetta against Longrigg, and it blinds him to who else he might be hurting or endangering in the process.

Director Susanna White (NANNY MCPHEE RETURNS, the “Parade’s End” miniseries) doesn’t miss the fact that the married couple at the center of this story is in the best shape they’ve been in in years as a result of feeling invested in this spy mission. The problem is that McGregor and Harris don’t have much spark, either as a couple or as crime fighters. Granted, they are supposed to be something of a lackluster pair at the start, but even when they start down the dangerous path of busting up a Russian mob, they don’t get more interesting.

There’s far more adversarial fire between Lewis and Northam. On a side note, I’m thrilled to see Northam in so many films of late (THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY, EYE IN THE SKY). He was a staple in British and American cinema in the 1990s and early 2000s, and after several years of doing mostly television (including “The Tudors”), it’s good to see him so strong in new films, albeit in supporting roles so far.

As for OUR KIND OF TRAITOR, it’s subpar as both a spy film and an action piece and even as a love story about a married couple attempting to rekindle their marriage. It takes too long to get going, it never truly convinced me that there was an imminent danger, and some of the spy machinations didn’t ring true. The film simply lacks intrigue, and while I certainly don’t need my spy stories (especially those by le Carré) to be sexy, I’d love to actually care about what’s going on in them. There are some good performances here, but it’s not enough to save the movie’s decidedly limp presentation.


BELLADONNA OF SADNESS
I promise you, you’ve never seen a film quite like this, especially in the animation world. You might have seen album covers of ’60s-’70s psychedelic bands like this before, but nothing that combines early Japanese anime with 19th century provincial French life, and even an unexpected sprinkling of Joan of Arc folklore—all spun together is a hyper-sexualized package that includes artfully rendered rape scenes, as well as sequences of the devil taking advantage of a young woman’s terrible life, in the hopes of stealing her body and soul. Until recently, 1973’s BELLADONNA OF SADNESS had never played in the United States, although we’ve seen evidence of other films that it influenced or films that influenced it.

The final installment in the adult-themed Animerama trilogy, produced by the godfather of Japanese anime/manga, Osamu Tezuka, and directed by long-time collaborator Eiichi Yamamoto (“Astro Boy” and “Kimba, the White Lion”), BELLADONNA OF SADNESS barely counts as what you might consider animation, and that’s not a putdown. Many of the images are charcoal sketches, line drawings or watercolor paintings that don’t move or have limited movement, relying more on the great voice work, including RAN’s Tatsuya Nakadai as the Devil and Aiko Nagayama as Jeanne, who is raped by a local lord on her wedding night to Jean (Katsutaka Ito). She is so distraught that she secretly wishes for great power to take revenge on those who hurt her, and before long, the Devil appears (in the guise of a phallic gnome) promising to grant her request in exchange for her soul.

In the meantime, he gives her enough power to turn her into a witch, which gives her the ability to challenge the authority of the leadership of this village, but also begins the slow and painful process of driving her insane and making her very horny. The newly restored 4K restoration includes nearly 10 minutes of graphic footage that was cut from the negative, and it gives the trippy, bombastic score from jazz composer Masahiko Satoh a real boost, kicking it into almost rock-opera territory.

I fully admit, as much as I didn’t find much in the way of artistic redemption in BELLADONNA OF SADNESS, I also had a tough time keeping my eyes off of it. The movie is more of an exercise is guessing what the filmmakers are going to hurl at us next in the strange and sometimes distasteful world of blended Japanese-French eroticism. If you have fully entrenched yourself in a politically correct world, you probably should avoid this odd little monster. But as someone who still dabbles in the world of anime when it gets a shot at the big screening, I enjoyed delving back into its kinky origins, which in this case, includes a bizarre epilogue that includes a sexy Joan of Arc burned at the stake, as if to say, “Some things never change.” Some of you may dig this one, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

-- Steve Prokopy
"Capone"
capone@aintitcool.com
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