This is one of those films whose alternate titles give rather different expectations.
Delitto a Oxford, Crime at Oxford, suggests a giallo, perhaps something akin to the same year’s The Weekend Murders.
Alba pagana, Pagan Dawn, suggests more of a fantasy or horror film, perhaps still a mystery/thriller but one that will move into Nothing But the Night or Wicker Man territory.
In the event, Ugo Liberatore’s film is less a giallo or a horror film than a drama, though its denouement isn’t too far from being a more realist, 1970-set version of Society.
For, like Brian Yuzna’s film, what is explored here is a particular demi-monde where it is all about fitting in, with our protagonist being the one who does not.
Not only is Alessio Orano’s Valerio Montelli an Italian in this most English of settings, but he’s also from humble origins, attending Oxford University on a rowing scholarship. As such, he’s only of interest to his fellow students and his tutors as athletic commodity and for his value as an anthropological curiosity.
And anthropological curiosity is what the film comes across as today on account of its documentary style scenes of student life and hippie subculture circa 1970 along with a prominently featured and ear-pleasing folk / psychedelic rock soundtrack, each as a vision of England through Italian eyes. (Franco Montemurro’s The Battle of the Mods is also worth a look in this regard for its representation of the Liverpool scene of a few years earlier.)
Equally, however, the combination of entrenched social hieararchy and hippies doesn’t quite gel given the latter’s purported ideology, unless we see the film as a proto-punk critique that was advancing the “don’t trust a hippie” idea six or so years avant la lettre.
John Steiner plays the aristocratic villain of the piece, Rodney Roderick Stanton; Jane Birkin the potential love interest and Rosella Falk her vaguely Mrs Robinson-esque mother, each proving ideal for their respective roles.
Liberatore’s direction is energetic and quite stylish, with some nice use of mirror-based compositions to highlight the themes of doubling, distortion and representation.
Showing posts with label John Steiner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Steiner. Show all posts
Thursday, 16 July 2009
Monday, 11 August 2008
I Cacciatori del cobra d'oro / Hunters of the Golden Cobra
In his essay on the Italian filone cinema of the late 50s through to the early 1980s in the Monthly Film Bulletin, critic Kim Newman makes the point that if this cinema could be for ripping-off Hollywood, it could also be praised for the energy and audacity of many of these rip-offs.
Hunters of the Golden Cobra is an case in point. Though clearly derivative of Raiders of the Lost Ark and, before it, the adventure serial – in turn a reminder that the only thing that was really new about Spielberg and Lucas's film were the resources and talent behind it – it showcases all that was best about this cinema in making the most of its comparatively limited resources with ingenuity and its sheer coglioni.
The story begins in 1944, as two British and American commandos, Bob Jackson and David Franks, played by the inimitable David Warbeck and John Steiner, launch a daring raid on a Japanese base somewhere in the Philippines; coveniently, these same islands also serve, post Apocalyse Now, as the actual locations for the film.
Their misson is to abduct Japanese officer Yamato, apparently an agent and counter agent.
Yamato has something else on his mind, however: The Golden Cobra. Recalling the likes of the golden snake of the Edgar Wallace novel and krimi film as much as Raider's Lost Ark – and thus as further reminders that in this day and age everything has some antecedent – this McGuffin is valuable in more ways than one, as we shall soon learn.
As Yamato flees the base after calmly gunning down the Japanese soldier who had discovered his treachery, Jackson and Franks embark on a desperate pursuit via jeep and then plane, bombs and buildings exploding all around them. (“You know, I've never driven one of these before” “Now you tell me.” “It's going to be quite an experience, I can assure you.”)
Yamato's plane crash lands on an island, so Jackson parachutes out after him while Franks returns to base with the promise of returning with reinforcements.
Jackson soon catches up with Yamato but both men are then shot with poisoned darts by the natives. Whereas Yamato is slain, Jackson is placed on a makeshift raft and floated downstream, unsure whether he has really seen a white woman at the head of the tribe or just hallucinated her presence...
A year or so passes, during which time the Japanese are defeated. Franks, still an officer in the British army, tracks down Jackson in a seedy bar, hitting the bottle hard and down on his luck to the extent that he's willing to trade his campaign medal for a couple of dollars.
With Jackson responding to Franks' hello with a right hook, a fistfight and then mass brawl breaks out before Franks finally gets the chance to explain himself. He did search for his colleague, but was delayed as his plane had ditched in the ocean some 200 miles from land.
Franks is not here about past history, however. Rather, he has been ordered to offer Jackson $20,000 to go back into the jungle with him and find the golden cobra. For, as Franks' superior in the briefing room explains, “If this priceless object should fall into the wrong hands, all of south east Asia could be destabilised [...] Call it superstition, but millions of people in Asia believe this golden cobra possesses some sort of supernatural power, a destructive force that we can't even imagine.”
Jackson remains cynical and reluctant until the high priestess of the cult appears on the screen wreathed in flames and a native waiter, evidently a member of the cult from his cobra tattoo, attacks him with a machette. He thus accepts the mission – but for $40,000, paid in advance.
By the time the expedition is ready to leave – during which time more cultists come out of the woodwork at every opportunity – it has gained two more people: a wealthy adventurer and archaeologist by the name of Greenwater (Alan Collins) and his niece Julie (Almanta Suska), who looks exactly like the woman from the island.
And so she should, for they are in fact sisters...
“I see no reason why we shouldn't all go” surmises Franks, and thus the adventure really begins...
The hunters and their quarry
Director Antonio Margheriti was quite simply the man for this kind of film, knowing not only how to deliver no-nonsense, testosterone-fuelled action scenes with the best of them but also a whole range of more subtle trick effects, ranging from model work with aeroplanes and lava-filled chasms to convincingly placing two his leading ladies in shot simultaneously
The implicit racism of the material with its backwards cultists and the white goddess figure of Suska is made slightly more palatable by the fact that Franks is just as much of a caricature; the base motives accorded most of the western characters, and, most interestingly, the space given one of the natives who opposes the cobra cultists for their backwardness and dreams of a progressive future for his country as one “with many friends and no masters – and that includes you westerners too.” (On this subject, it's also worth remembering that Jackie Chan's Armour of God isn't exactly politically correct either, with its 'comedy' tribesmen.)
The natives bowing down before the white goddess, as per usual
Warbeck is reliable as ever as the tough, no-nonsense action hero, making one lament that he was never given the opportunity to play James Bond, while Steiner's unflappable British officer with his Terry-Thomas style upper class twit voice is amusing without becoming tiresome.
The talismanic Collins, whom Margheriti would always cast if he got the chance is suitably shifty, his character's name recalling Sidney Greenstreet, his mannerisms that actor's Maltese Falcon co-star, Peter Lorre; on the Bond angle Jackson amusingly calls Greenriver Greenfinger at one point.
If the final couple of minutes, featuring an awful theme song performed by someone with a somewhat flexible sense of pitch, are painful, the preceding 90 odd are compensation enough.
[I watched the film on a English-dubbed, Japanese (?) subtitled AVI, again found via Cinemageddon]
Hunters of the Golden Cobra is an case in point. Though clearly derivative of Raiders of the Lost Ark and, before it, the adventure serial – in turn a reminder that the only thing that was really new about Spielberg and Lucas's film were the resources and talent behind it – it showcases all that was best about this cinema in making the most of its comparatively limited resources with ingenuity and its sheer coglioni.
The story begins in 1944, as two British and American commandos, Bob Jackson and David Franks, played by the inimitable David Warbeck and John Steiner, launch a daring raid on a Japanese base somewhere in the Philippines; coveniently, these same islands also serve, post Apocalyse Now, as the actual locations for the film.
Their misson is to abduct Japanese officer Yamato, apparently an agent and counter agent.
Yamato has something else on his mind, however: The Golden Cobra. Recalling the likes of the golden snake of the Edgar Wallace novel and krimi film as much as Raider's Lost Ark – and thus as further reminders that in this day and age everything has some antecedent – this McGuffin is valuable in more ways than one, as we shall soon learn.
As Yamato flees the base after calmly gunning down the Japanese soldier who had discovered his treachery, Jackson and Franks embark on a desperate pursuit via jeep and then plane, bombs and buildings exploding all around them. (“You know, I've never driven one of these before” “Now you tell me.” “It's going to be quite an experience, I can assure you.”)
Yamato's plane crash lands on an island, so Jackson parachutes out after him while Franks returns to base with the promise of returning with reinforcements.
Jackson soon catches up with Yamato but both men are then shot with poisoned darts by the natives. Whereas Yamato is slain, Jackson is placed on a makeshift raft and floated downstream, unsure whether he has really seen a white woman at the head of the tribe or just hallucinated her presence...
A year or so passes, during which time the Japanese are defeated. Franks, still an officer in the British army, tracks down Jackson in a seedy bar, hitting the bottle hard and down on his luck to the extent that he's willing to trade his campaign medal for a couple of dollars.
With Jackson responding to Franks' hello with a right hook, a fistfight and then mass brawl breaks out before Franks finally gets the chance to explain himself. He did search for his colleague, but was delayed as his plane had ditched in the ocean some 200 miles from land.
Franks is not here about past history, however. Rather, he has been ordered to offer Jackson $20,000 to go back into the jungle with him and find the golden cobra. For, as Franks' superior in the briefing room explains, “If this priceless object should fall into the wrong hands, all of south east Asia could be destabilised [...] Call it superstition, but millions of people in Asia believe this golden cobra possesses some sort of supernatural power, a destructive force that we can't even imagine.”
Jackson remains cynical and reluctant until the high priestess of the cult appears on the screen wreathed in flames and a native waiter, evidently a member of the cult from his cobra tattoo, attacks him with a machette. He thus accepts the mission – but for $40,000, paid in advance.
By the time the expedition is ready to leave – during which time more cultists come out of the woodwork at every opportunity – it has gained two more people: a wealthy adventurer and archaeologist by the name of Greenwater (Alan Collins) and his niece Julie (Almanta Suska), who looks exactly like the woman from the island.
And so she should, for they are in fact sisters...
“I see no reason why we shouldn't all go” surmises Franks, and thus the adventure really begins...
The hunters and their quarry
Director Antonio Margheriti was quite simply the man for this kind of film, knowing not only how to deliver no-nonsense, testosterone-fuelled action scenes with the best of them but also a whole range of more subtle trick effects, ranging from model work with aeroplanes and lava-filled chasms to convincingly placing two his leading ladies in shot simultaneously
The implicit racism of the material with its backwards cultists and the white goddess figure of Suska is made slightly more palatable by the fact that Franks is just as much of a caricature; the base motives accorded most of the western characters, and, most interestingly, the space given one of the natives who opposes the cobra cultists for their backwardness and dreams of a progressive future for his country as one “with many friends and no masters – and that includes you westerners too.” (On this subject, it's also worth remembering that Jackie Chan's Armour of God isn't exactly politically correct either, with its 'comedy' tribesmen.)
The natives bowing down before the white goddess, as per usual
Warbeck is reliable as ever as the tough, no-nonsense action hero, making one lament that he was never given the opportunity to play James Bond, while Steiner's unflappable British officer with his Terry-Thomas style upper class twit voice is amusing without becoming tiresome.
The talismanic Collins, whom Margheriti would always cast if he got the chance is suitably shifty, his character's name recalling Sidney Greenstreet, his mannerisms that actor's Maltese Falcon co-star, Peter Lorre; on the Bond angle Jackson amusingly calls Greenriver Greenfinger at one point.
If the final couple of minutes, featuring an awful theme song performed by someone with a somewhat flexible sense of pitch, are painful, the preceding 90 odd are compensation enough.
[I watched the film on a English-dubbed, Japanese (?) subtitled AVI, again found via Cinemageddon]
Monday, 21 July 2008
Le Deportate della sezione speciale SS / Deported Women of the SS Special Section
Though featuring the expected elements of sex, sleaze, sadism, shocks and showers, this 1977 Nazisploitation entry from Rino De Silvestro is unusual in other regards, evincing a comparatively serious and sombre tone at times and featuring a few scenes which hint at a challenge to the viewer's pleasure in watching the film.
De Silvestro makes his bid for authorship
Set in the dying days of the Third Reich, the film begins with the transportation of a mixed group of female prisoners by a filthy but perhaps surprisingly roomy cattle car.
Flashbacks establish our main protagonist, Tanya Nobel, an aristocrat of German extraction who has renounced the Reich and the Volk in favour of her Polish resistance lover; as is usually the case in the filone story takes priority over history.
Erna Schurer and John S
Tanya immediately earns the enmity of Trudy, who is determined to become a Kapo once they arrive at their destination. Trudy's character is more sketchily drawn, however. While there is an element of class resentment to her remarks – “Leave her alone” “Oh yeah! Just who the fuck do you think you are! Your aristocratic background doesn't mean shit here! You're up to your neck in it just like the rest of us!” – it isn't that clear why she is a prisoner rather than a Nazi in this regard beyond her lesbian proclivities, though I certainly suspect that she is something of an anti-social element who could not be relied upon to put the values of the Reich above her own gratifications rather than a leftist.
Whatever the case, it soon emerges that this is another one of those films where the activities of the Nazis themselves don't seem particularly geared towards the instrumentally rational goal of winning the war nor the value rational one of ridding the Reich of those they deem undesirable; while the two goals were perhaps not altogether incompatible when the war was going well by the time the film is set they almost certainly were in terms of suggesting conflicting deployments of men and material.
A Suspiria-style lightbulb shot and a row of less than happy campers
As the train pulls into the station, Tanya and another prisoner make a bid for freedom. Trudy notices and alerts the guards. Tanya is thus recaptured while the other woman is gunned down; again, students of Nazi crimes rather than their representation in the Nazisploitation filone might have cause for pause here as to the probability of this scene.
From the station, the prisoners are transferred to the camp, apparently located in an old castle. Trudy gets her wish to become a kapo and thus gets to dish out rather than receive the same humiliation and brutalisation as the others as they are processed and assigned new duties.
Tanya is earmarked to be a field whore serving in the Joy Division until the camp commander Erner notices her name on the roster. As another flashback explains, Erner is infatuated with Tanya, althought she had always refused his attentions.
Erner thus decides to keep Tanya in the camp and resolves to make her love him, resulting in a battle of wills between the two as the other inmates struggle to survive amidst the capricious wardens and kapos that all builds to a dramatic and suspenseful climax...
Kapo Trudy wielding her phallic baton
As is often the case in the filone, the reasons for the prisoners being in the camp – whether their 'crimes' are ethnic/religious, sexual, political or otherwise – are not specified with the exception of Tanya.
Unsurprisingly the incidence of homosexuality – as a 'perversion' – is presented as be far higher amongst the Nazis and their confederates than the prisoners, with two wardens getting into a catfight over their respective claims over one piece of live property:
“She's my whore”
“Oh yeah, fuck you. What are you going to do about it?”
“I'll show you! [slap]”
Far more surprising and interesting, however, is the scene of male homosexual activity between Erner and his devoted underling, Dobermann [sic] by virtue of giving the implied male heterosexual audience something they didn't expect or desire; as one IMBD reviewer remarks: “This was the last thing I was expecting to see [...] Needless to say, a big turn off.”
Ernst and Dobermann
Significantly this scene is also presaged by one of the battles of wills between Tanya and Erner, as she pointedly refuses to gaze at his humiliation of two other field whores by compelling them to make out with one another and then fellate him, before then moving to seduce Dobermann – a combination cumulatively suggesting a somewhat Sartean dynamic of looking and refusing to look that, while being about power, cannot be reduced to male / female, active looking / passive to be looked at ness. (“You have to look! You can't refuse my spectacle!,” as Erner screams at Tanya.)
Despite this difference, one of the problems with the Nazisploitation filone more generally that again emerges is that of scale. These low-budget films lacked the resources to convincingly depict a larger-scale camp with hundreds or thousands of prisoners, only ever being able to present small-scale and somewhat specialist facilities with only a couple dozen inmates at most at a time.
Their production design also tends to be that bit off, as when the rows of improbably comfortable looking beds and the showers with abundant hot water and soap for those long shower scenes come across as more appropriate to a prison, convent or girls' school – a lack of specificity which further highlights the ease with which the same basic stock scenario, situations and sets could so often be redressed by a simple substitution of mother superior for head warden or SS doctor.
Tanya refusing to gaze...
... making a defiant, resistant gaze of her own...
... and as the laughing woman...
On the plus side, the direction is more accomplished than many others of its kind, with some effective camera set ups and movements. Likewise although the inmates – including Stefanio D'Amario and Sara Sperati – are as usual that bit too healthy and well-fed looking to really convince as the real thing, they and the other performers – including Erna Schurer, Solvi Stubing and John Steiner amonst the Nazi contingent – are uniformly committed to their roles and, within the melodramatic, operatic and campy boundaries of the filone, more than adequate.
Stelvio Cipriani' score is another asset, although some of his cues are recognisable from elsewhere, such as the lush, romantic piano piece that build ups to the Countess's murder in Bay of Blood.
De Silvestro makes his bid for authorship
Set in the dying days of the Third Reich, the film begins with the transportation of a mixed group of female prisoners by a filthy but perhaps surprisingly roomy cattle car.
Flashbacks establish our main protagonist, Tanya Nobel, an aristocrat of German extraction who has renounced the Reich and the Volk in favour of her Polish resistance lover; as is usually the case in the filone story takes priority over history.
Erna Schurer and John S
Tanya immediately earns the enmity of Trudy, who is determined to become a Kapo once they arrive at their destination. Trudy's character is more sketchily drawn, however. While there is an element of class resentment to her remarks – “Leave her alone” “Oh yeah! Just who the fuck do you think you are! Your aristocratic background doesn't mean shit here! You're up to your neck in it just like the rest of us!” – it isn't that clear why she is a prisoner rather than a Nazi in this regard beyond her lesbian proclivities, though I certainly suspect that she is something of an anti-social element who could not be relied upon to put the values of the Reich above her own gratifications rather than a leftist.
Whatever the case, it soon emerges that this is another one of those films where the activities of the Nazis themselves don't seem particularly geared towards the instrumentally rational goal of winning the war nor the value rational one of ridding the Reich of those they deem undesirable; while the two goals were perhaps not altogether incompatible when the war was going well by the time the film is set they almost certainly were in terms of suggesting conflicting deployments of men and material.
A Suspiria-style lightbulb shot and a row of less than happy campers
As the train pulls into the station, Tanya and another prisoner make a bid for freedom. Trudy notices and alerts the guards. Tanya is thus recaptured while the other woman is gunned down; again, students of Nazi crimes rather than their representation in the Nazisploitation filone might have cause for pause here as to the probability of this scene.
From the station, the prisoners are transferred to the camp, apparently located in an old castle. Trudy gets her wish to become a kapo and thus gets to dish out rather than receive the same humiliation and brutalisation as the others as they are processed and assigned new duties.
Tanya is earmarked to be a field whore serving in the Joy Division until the camp commander Erner notices her name on the roster. As another flashback explains, Erner is infatuated with Tanya, althought she had always refused his attentions.
Erner thus decides to keep Tanya in the camp and resolves to make her love him, resulting in a battle of wills between the two as the other inmates struggle to survive amidst the capricious wardens and kapos that all builds to a dramatic and suspenseful climax...
Kapo Trudy wielding her phallic baton
As is often the case in the filone, the reasons for the prisoners being in the camp – whether their 'crimes' are ethnic/religious, sexual, political or otherwise – are not specified with the exception of Tanya.
Unsurprisingly the incidence of homosexuality – as a 'perversion' – is presented as be far higher amongst the Nazis and their confederates than the prisoners, with two wardens getting into a catfight over their respective claims over one piece of live property:
“She's my whore”
“Oh yeah, fuck you. What are you going to do about it?”
“I'll show you! [slap]”
Far more surprising and interesting, however, is the scene of male homosexual activity between Erner and his devoted underling, Dobermann [sic] by virtue of giving the implied male heterosexual audience something they didn't expect or desire; as one IMBD reviewer remarks: “This was the last thing I was expecting to see [...] Needless to say, a big turn off.”
Ernst and Dobermann
Significantly this scene is also presaged by one of the battles of wills between Tanya and Erner, as she pointedly refuses to gaze at his humiliation of two other field whores by compelling them to make out with one another and then fellate him, before then moving to seduce Dobermann – a combination cumulatively suggesting a somewhat Sartean dynamic of looking and refusing to look that, while being about power, cannot be reduced to male / female, active looking / passive to be looked at ness. (“You have to look! You can't refuse my spectacle!,” as Erner screams at Tanya.)
Despite this difference, one of the problems with the Nazisploitation filone more generally that again emerges is that of scale. These low-budget films lacked the resources to convincingly depict a larger-scale camp with hundreds or thousands of prisoners, only ever being able to present small-scale and somewhat specialist facilities with only a couple dozen inmates at most at a time.
Their production design also tends to be that bit off, as when the rows of improbably comfortable looking beds and the showers with abundant hot water and soap for those long shower scenes come across as more appropriate to a prison, convent or girls' school – a lack of specificity which further highlights the ease with which the same basic stock scenario, situations and sets could so often be redressed by a simple substitution of mother superior for head warden or SS doctor.
Tanya refusing to gaze...
... making a defiant, resistant gaze of her own...
... and as the laughing woman...
On the plus side, the direction is more accomplished than many others of its kind, with some effective camera set ups and movements. Likewise although the inmates – including Stefanio D'Amario and Sara Sperati – are as usual that bit too healthy and well-fed looking to really convince as the real thing, they and the other performers – including Erna Schurer, Solvi Stubing and John Steiner amonst the Nazi contingent – are uniformly committed to their roles and, within the melodramatic, operatic and campy boundaries of the filone, more than adequate.
Stelvio Cipriani' score is another asset, although some of his cues are recognisable from elsewhere, such as the lush, romantic piano piece that build ups to the Countess's murder in Bay of Blood.
Monday, 7 July 2008
Una Ondata di piacere / A Wave of Pleasure / Waves of Lust
The opening image of Waves of Lust throws you, makes you pay attention: it’s upside down.
Has someone made a mistake?
The answer is no: we are sharing the point of view of a man standing on his head.
“How's the world upside down?”
“Basically the same as right side up.”
“Then just as sick.”
Rather than being a simple attention-grabbing strategy on the part of the filmmakers – you can imagine audiences being ready to throw things at the screen or to scream at the projectionist – it's also an image that is crucial to an understanding of this 1975 erotic thriller / drama, recurring as it does at the film’s conclusion.
As a device, the image brings to mind the theories of the Russian Formalists, with their notion of defamiliarisation, taking something we know and take for granted and representing it in an unfamiliar way to make us question our presumptions and assumptions. It was, for the formalists, a key component of poetic language.
Yes, it’s yet another filone film that has more to it than meets the eye and which offers a number of interpretive challenges and possibilities.
It's also a vital film for anyone interested in the work of director Ruggero Deodato specifically, coming at a time when he had spent a number of years in television productions to mark the inauguration of his second, 'mature' period as a filmmaker and the introduction of a number of signature marks that would become more pronounced with his later, more (in)famous works.
In Deodato's best films – amongst which Waves of Lust certainly counts – he rarely gives us what we expect. Unless, that is, what we are expecting is a showcasing of humanity at its worst...
Deodato is a filmmaker who denies us easy answers and heroes and villains, tending more to present a division between the dead and the living, more often than not survivors who have been profoundly affected – or damaged – by their experiences.
He also subverts our narrative expectations. The most obvious instance of this is, of course, Cannibal Holocaust with its two films in one structure, but much the same could be said of his thrillers, Waves of Lust included, insofar as he has never really made a straight giallo.
There's no murder mystery plot here, with the discovery of a dead body early on leading nowhere; none of the familiar iconography beyond the J&B bottle, almost a character in its own right at times as it is consumed in quantities that the manufacturers could hardly endorse; and a fundamentally different logic underlying what we are told, not told and left to decide for ourselves.
Not promoting responsible drinking
The result is a chamber piece in which the air is thick with sexual tension, recalling Polanski's Knife in the Water as much as anything, which keeps looking like it is about to move into more obvious Lenzi-style sexy giallo territory but never quite does – a strategy of formalist retardation, at a stretch – by refusing to signpost an obvious noir-style conspiracy of power, lust and wealth despite the central presence of these three ingredients.
The film presents the story of two somewhat contrasting couples who happen to be vacationing at the same coastal resort at the same time.
The first couple comprises Irem – the man standing on his head – and Barbara. They're a bit younger and a bit counter-cultural, but otherwise deliberately sketchily drawn.
The second comprises Giorgio and Silvia. He's a wealthy businessman with a tendency towards cruelty even when sober, she's his property / trophy and the main target of his verbal, mental and physical abuse.
After a few apparently chance encounters in the resort's marketplace and gallery, Giorgio invites Barbara for dinner. She sends Irem in her stead and then arrives with Silvia, whose presence Giorgio had not counted on.
As the evening goes on, it is decided that Irem and Barbara will accompany Giorgio and Silvia on their boating trip. All manner of sexual and other tensions arise as Giorgio expresses his interest in Barbara – an interest which she reciprocates and Irem, with his hippie ideas, is happy to go along with – but proves reluctant to grant parallel license to Silvia, whom he continues to abuse and humiliate...
Along the way we get just about every combination except Giorgio and Irem
Though not as harsh a film as Cannibal Holocaust or House on the Edge of the Park, Waves of Lust still offers a heady mix of sex, violence and general unpleasantness. Yet, it is all curiously unobjectionable, making sense in its own terms.
Thus, if Giorgio at one point brutally stabs an eel he has caught while fishing it is presented, cannibal film-like, as part of nature, red in tooth and claw and, beyond this as an expression of his capitalist, social darwinist understanding of the world – “You fired 600 people?!” “My business regards no one else” – which, in turn, relates back to his cruelty and borderline psychopathic behaviour.
“You've completely destroyed it!”
“It would have done the same to me”
“No that's not true. Humans are always more ferocious. Animals kill out of defence or for food. Only humans do it for their own enjoyment. You enjoy seeing people suffer.”
Yet, in this, he's also different from David Hess's character in House on the Edge of the Park. Whereas Hess's proletarian character is all untrammeled id, doing things without regard for their longer term consequences, Giorgio, with the possible exception of his bingeing on J&B, is far more forward planning and in control.
He behaves in this way, uses these strategies and plays these games because he knows he can get away with them and that they fundamentally work for him, bringing rewards because of the way 'the system' operates.
“You almost killed me today”
“I'm sorry. The idea of going to jail over you doesn't entice me.”
“Don't worry, guys like you never go to jail.”
“You're right.”
As such, like the bourgeois who set up Hess in House's rape-revenge scenario or the cats paws and manipulators of many a giallo, there is then the awkward question of who are the real monsters are, those who cannot help themselves or those who would take advantage of them in their schemes.
In a similar vein, thought the film contains extensive nudity and softcore sex these elements come across not just as an exploitation film essentials – how exactly would you do an erotic thriller without them? – but also as a part of Deodato's almost anthropologically detached approach.
If as a filmmaker he exploits sex as a commodity, it is also because sex also has a commodified value in the world he is depicting.
Deodato's worldview thus for the first time emerges in Waves of Lust as that uniquely disconcerting combination of the critical – there is little doubt that we are supposed to be against Giorgio – and the cynical / cyclical.
Specifically, his take on revolutions, be they social, sexual or both, looks to be along the lines of “what goes around comes around,” leading not so much to a transcendence of any master / slave dialectics as to a temporary – i.e. 180 degree – reversal of fortunes and positions. As with Cannibal Holocaust's closing remark / question, “I wonder who the real cannibals are,” one suspects that this struck a bit too close to home for some.
Deodato's direction is not quite as accomplished as it would be in later films, being functional and effective without always convincing that he had chosen this or that set up, angle or movement for any specific, 'meaningful' reason. This could also, however, be put down in part to the inherent constraints imposed by the main setting. Certainly there is a contrast between the confined spaces and pointed exchanges of words and glances that tend to predominate on the boat and the sub-aqua sequences – likely the major contribution of co-writer Gianlorenzo Battaglia, best known as an underwater camera specialist – whose blue expanses and silence provide punctuating moments of apparent tranquilty.
Even so, danger is ambiguously present, as when Silvia gets trapped in between some rocks on the sea bottom and must be rescued by the others in a collective effort. Was this an accident or a pre-planned incident, a challenge issued by some of those present to see how others would react? As ever, Deodato provides no easy answers or get out, only questions and challenges.
As Giorgio, John Steiner again impresses in his willingness to go for it in the role of a human monster while remaining believably scary. The role of Iram is well-suited to Al Cliver's laid-back, casual style, with his relative inexpressiveness contributing to the effectiveness of his performance by making Iram that bit harder to read. Silvia Dioniso and Elizabeth Turner, as Barbara and Silvia respectively, likewise impress, delivering credible performances that belie the notion they are only present for decorative purposes.
Marcello Giombini's reedy synth score is one of the film's few weak points, though is not too intrusive and also helps ground the film in its specific time and place with its easy / sleazy / trash stylings that provide an aural counterpart to Dioniso's extra-wide flares and Steiner's tastefully patterned trunks.
Another view:
http://bloodyitaliana.blogspot.com/2008/02/ruggero-deodatos-waves-of-lust-1975.html
Has someone made a mistake?
The answer is no: we are sharing the point of view of a man standing on his head.
“How's the world upside down?”
“Basically the same as right side up.”
“Then just as sick.”
Rather than being a simple attention-grabbing strategy on the part of the filmmakers – you can imagine audiences being ready to throw things at the screen or to scream at the projectionist – it's also an image that is crucial to an understanding of this 1975 erotic thriller / drama, recurring as it does at the film’s conclusion.
As a device, the image brings to mind the theories of the Russian Formalists, with their notion of defamiliarisation, taking something we know and take for granted and representing it in an unfamiliar way to make us question our presumptions and assumptions. It was, for the formalists, a key component of poetic language.
Yes, it’s yet another filone film that has more to it than meets the eye and which offers a number of interpretive challenges and possibilities.
It's also a vital film for anyone interested in the work of director Ruggero Deodato specifically, coming at a time when he had spent a number of years in television productions to mark the inauguration of his second, 'mature' period as a filmmaker and the introduction of a number of signature marks that would become more pronounced with his later, more (in)famous works.
In Deodato's best films – amongst which Waves of Lust certainly counts – he rarely gives us what we expect. Unless, that is, what we are expecting is a showcasing of humanity at its worst...
Deodato is a filmmaker who denies us easy answers and heroes and villains, tending more to present a division between the dead and the living, more often than not survivors who have been profoundly affected – or damaged – by their experiences.
He also subverts our narrative expectations. The most obvious instance of this is, of course, Cannibal Holocaust with its two films in one structure, but much the same could be said of his thrillers, Waves of Lust included, insofar as he has never really made a straight giallo.
There's no murder mystery plot here, with the discovery of a dead body early on leading nowhere; none of the familiar iconography beyond the J&B bottle, almost a character in its own right at times as it is consumed in quantities that the manufacturers could hardly endorse; and a fundamentally different logic underlying what we are told, not told and left to decide for ourselves.
Not promoting responsible drinking
The result is a chamber piece in which the air is thick with sexual tension, recalling Polanski's Knife in the Water as much as anything, which keeps looking like it is about to move into more obvious Lenzi-style sexy giallo territory but never quite does – a strategy of formalist retardation, at a stretch – by refusing to signpost an obvious noir-style conspiracy of power, lust and wealth despite the central presence of these three ingredients.
The film presents the story of two somewhat contrasting couples who happen to be vacationing at the same coastal resort at the same time.
The first couple comprises Irem – the man standing on his head – and Barbara. They're a bit younger and a bit counter-cultural, but otherwise deliberately sketchily drawn.
The second comprises Giorgio and Silvia. He's a wealthy businessman with a tendency towards cruelty even when sober, she's his property / trophy and the main target of his verbal, mental and physical abuse.
After a few apparently chance encounters in the resort's marketplace and gallery, Giorgio invites Barbara for dinner. She sends Irem in her stead and then arrives with Silvia, whose presence Giorgio had not counted on.
As the evening goes on, it is decided that Irem and Barbara will accompany Giorgio and Silvia on their boating trip. All manner of sexual and other tensions arise as Giorgio expresses his interest in Barbara – an interest which she reciprocates and Irem, with his hippie ideas, is happy to go along with – but proves reluctant to grant parallel license to Silvia, whom he continues to abuse and humiliate...
Along the way we get just about every combination except Giorgio and Irem
Though not as harsh a film as Cannibal Holocaust or House on the Edge of the Park, Waves of Lust still offers a heady mix of sex, violence and general unpleasantness. Yet, it is all curiously unobjectionable, making sense in its own terms.
Thus, if Giorgio at one point brutally stabs an eel he has caught while fishing it is presented, cannibal film-like, as part of nature, red in tooth and claw and, beyond this as an expression of his capitalist, social darwinist understanding of the world – “You fired 600 people?!” “My business regards no one else” – which, in turn, relates back to his cruelty and borderline psychopathic behaviour.
“You've completely destroyed it!”
“It would have done the same to me”
“No that's not true. Humans are always more ferocious. Animals kill out of defence or for food. Only humans do it for their own enjoyment. You enjoy seeing people suffer.”
Yet, in this, he's also different from David Hess's character in House on the Edge of the Park. Whereas Hess's proletarian character is all untrammeled id, doing things without regard for their longer term consequences, Giorgio, with the possible exception of his bingeing on J&B, is far more forward planning and in control.
He behaves in this way, uses these strategies and plays these games because he knows he can get away with them and that they fundamentally work for him, bringing rewards because of the way 'the system' operates.
“You almost killed me today”
“I'm sorry. The idea of going to jail over you doesn't entice me.”
“Don't worry, guys like you never go to jail.”
“You're right.”
As such, like the bourgeois who set up Hess in House's rape-revenge scenario or the cats paws and manipulators of many a giallo, there is then the awkward question of who are the real monsters are, those who cannot help themselves or those who would take advantage of them in their schemes.
In a similar vein, thought the film contains extensive nudity and softcore sex these elements come across not just as an exploitation film essentials – how exactly would you do an erotic thriller without them? – but also as a part of Deodato's almost anthropologically detached approach.
If as a filmmaker he exploits sex as a commodity, it is also because sex also has a commodified value in the world he is depicting.
Deodato's worldview thus for the first time emerges in Waves of Lust as that uniquely disconcerting combination of the critical – there is little doubt that we are supposed to be against Giorgio – and the cynical / cyclical.
Specifically, his take on revolutions, be they social, sexual or both, looks to be along the lines of “what goes around comes around,” leading not so much to a transcendence of any master / slave dialectics as to a temporary – i.e. 180 degree – reversal of fortunes and positions. As with Cannibal Holocaust's closing remark / question, “I wonder who the real cannibals are,” one suspects that this struck a bit too close to home for some.
Deodato's direction is not quite as accomplished as it would be in later films, being functional and effective without always convincing that he had chosen this or that set up, angle or movement for any specific, 'meaningful' reason. This could also, however, be put down in part to the inherent constraints imposed by the main setting. Certainly there is a contrast between the confined spaces and pointed exchanges of words and glances that tend to predominate on the boat and the sub-aqua sequences – likely the major contribution of co-writer Gianlorenzo Battaglia, best known as an underwater camera specialist – whose blue expanses and silence provide punctuating moments of apparent tranquilty.
Even so, danger is ambiguously present, as when Silvia gets trapped in between some rocks on the sea bottom and must be rescued by the others in a collective effort. Was this an accident or a pre-planned incident, a challenge issued by some of those present to see how others would react? As ever, Deodato provides no easy answers or get out, only questions and challenges.
As Giorgio, John Steiner again impresses in his willingness to go for it in the role of a human monster while remaining believably scary. The role of Iram is well-suited to Al Cliver's laid-back, casual style, with his relative inexpressiveness contributing to the effectiveness of his performance by making Iram that bit harder to read. Silvia Dioniso and Elizabeth Turner, as Barbara and Silvia respectively, likewise impress, delivering credible performances that belie the notion they are only present for decorative purposes.
Marcello Giombini's reedy synth score is one of the film's few weak points, though is not too intrusive and also helps ground the film in its specific time and place with its easy / sleazy / trash stylings that provide an aural counterpart to Dioniso's extra-wide flares and Steiner's tastefully patterned trunks.
Another view:
http://bloodyitaliana.blogspot.com/2008/02/ruggero-deodatos-waves-of-lust-1975.html
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