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Originally released in 2010, Srdan Spasojevic’s purposely repulsive meditation on his country’s spiritual rot is being rereleased in Japan in a sparkling renovated 4K version that seems hardly necessary given what the viewer has to watch, and yet much of A Serbian Film‘s transgressive energy relies on the way its visual tone changes from one medium to another, since much of what takes place on screen is something recreated either on old tape, new tape, or within the mind of the protagonist, a semi-retired porn star named Milos (Srdan Todorovic). Moreover, the parts of the film that are supposed to be taking place in the cinematic “present” are carefully lit for maximum effect so as to throw the viewer off the scent of where the story is going.

That story starts out simply enough. Retirement for Milos, considered the greatest porn actor of his generation, at least in Serbia, isn’t quite as relaxed as he had hoped. He finds it difficult to support his wife, Marija (Jelena Gavrilovic), a freelance translator, and young son, and when an offer comes through an old associate to do one last film with a shadowy but hilariously pretentious director named Vukmir (Sergei Trifunovic) for a lot of money, he reluctantly takes it, even though he doesn’t really know what the movie will entail except that, as Vukmir explains, it will be a work of art like nothing ever produced in Serbia, which he describes as being “one big shitty kindergarten.” But once production of the movie starts in earnest, A Serbian Film abandons its linear development for a more patchwork structure that seems to be dictated by Milos’s drug-addled consciousness, or lack thereof. The film is being shot in an institution for orphans and abused children, who end up figuring heavily in many scenes, and not just as witnesses to the violent debauchery that Vukmir stages and Milos, pumped up with cattle aphrodisiac, partakes in with little of the professional nuance he brought to his more conventional work. In fact, he sometimes wakes up bloody and doesn’t remember what he did, and thus has to clandestinely secure the tapes and watch the horrors on a camcorder screen. 

What most viewers take away from A Serbian Film is Spasojevic’s willingness to push every taboo way past its acceptable limit, which is to say that while it gets really disgusting you never entertain the notion that these scenes are anything more than ingeniously staged slices of horror, and thus lack the truly disturbing element that Gaspar Noe brings to his own peculiar brand of transgressive cinema. But while the movie doesn’t impress as much as Spasojevic—who, I suspect, used himself as Vukmir’s scummy model—likely thinks it does, its jaundiced portrayal of a larger society through a very circumscribed subculture is convincing. I imagine Serbians don’t appreciate Spasojevic’s title, which implies the film is some sort of last word, but even if I don’t have firsthand experience with his country, I understood exactly what he was trying to say. (Note: The press screener I saw was the uncut version, which is banned in most countries. The new Japanese version for public consumption may be altered somewhat, but no scenes will be taken out.)

In Serbian. Now playing in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551.

A Serbian Film home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2010 Contrafilm 201

Because of its function as a recording medium, cinema’s entire history is fairly well represented. Pamela B. Green’s documentary purports to bring to the public’s attention a woman filmmaker whose pioneering accomplishments, because she was a woman, have mostly been ignored, though if you run a cursory Google search you’ll find lots of information about Alice Guy-Blache, including extensive collections of her works available for sale and streaming. This isn’t to say that Guy-Blache has received her due at the same level as her male contemporaries and heirs, but only that if her story is approached from the standpoint of the development of cinema, she’s already, relatively speaking, something of a star. Even Hitchcock was a fan.

Her tale is certainly fascinating. Born in France to Chilean parents, Alice Guy was hired as a secretary in 1894 for a camera company that was eventually bought out by four men, including the early entrepreneur Leon Gaumont, who started using the company to produce films. Guy worked her way up to the production side of the business and, frustrated by the company’s fixation on film as a novelty, she became one of the first visionaries to see it as a story-telling medium. She started directing films, but Gaumont neglected to give her proper credit for her contributions, even after she ascended to head of production after the turn of the century. She eventually moved with her husband, Herbert Blache, to the U.S. to head Gaumont’s American operations, but in 1910 they struck out on their own and set up Solax Studio, first in Flushing, New York, and then in Fort Lee, New Jersey, which, thanks to her efforts, became the center of film production in America, well before the emergence of Hollywood. Her success as both an artist and a businessperson was notable, though her husband took much of the credit for her work. By the time she divorced him and the studio became insolvent in the 1920s, she had made about 1,000 movies and in the process invented many of the narrative film techniques that we now take for granted.

Much of Green’s film is narrated by Jodie Foster, whose command of French, especially while reading the epistolary materials, gives the doc a gravity it might not otherwise have. Green manages to talk to almost every scholar who has a stake in Guy-Blache’s legacy, but she also talks to well-known actors and filmmakers whose input mostly comes down to, “Wow, I never knew about this woman!” She also frames the development of the second half of the film around her detective work in tracking down relatives of Guy-Blache who may still have relevant artifacts hidden in boxes in the attic. None of this is boring, but it tends to reduce Guy-Blache’s story to a mystery that, in fact, was solved years ago, even if Green’s own sleuthing uncovered several film fragments that were thought to be lost. Of course, any movie nut who knows nothing about Guy-Blache will definitely want to check out Be Natural, but it sometimes feels a bit cluttered, like one of those attics. 

In English and French. Opens July 22 in Tokyo at Uplink Kichijoji (0422-66-5042)

Be Natural home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2018 Be Natural LLC

The appeal of mountain climbing, even to those who have absolutely no interest in partaking themselves, is special. The old colloquy of why one would want to scale a peak and then the intended interlocutor coming back with “because it’s there” both accentuates and disregards the mystery behind the climber’s obsession. In recent years there has been a sudden surfeit of climbing movies, both fiction features and documentaries, and the reason they’ve become so ubiquitous is twofold: climbers themselves have become skilled at the art of filmmaking; and drones. This combination definitely comes into its own with The Alpinist. The directors, Peter Mortimer and Nick Rosen, are both seasoned alpinists and they take as their subject a figure that, until the pair decided to make a movie about him, would have likely remained just another legend within a cognoscenti delineated by a fixation on a rare and infamously dangerous sport. Canadian Marc-Andre Leclerc was considered the best of the best, and not just because his rock and ice climbing skills were next to superhuman. Like all great artists he shunned anything that fell outside his specific art. When he climbed, he climbed solo and didn’t tell anyone about it, so his greatest feats were known only to him. Nevertheless, he did have friends, invariably part of the climbing community, and word got out. Mortimer and Rosen finally approached him about making a movie when he was barely into his 20s and he agreed as long as they didn’t get in his way. The Alpinist is suitably, fascinatingly wonky, because the directors are pleasing themselves first, but this attention to detail is what makes The Alpinist superior to the Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo, which was also directed by a pair of climbers, and is intrinsically linked to Leclerc’s m.o. of being tight-lipped and unflappable, whereas the subject of Free Solo, climber Alex Honnold, was more of a raconteur-philosopher, and thus a less naturally charismatic focus for a movie about an athlete, which should be about the doing, not the explaining.

What Mortimer (who also narrates) and Rosen provide in addition to the thrills and awe-inspiring visuals expected of mountaineering movies is a portrait of a loner that transcends the usual cliches about loners. Leclerc, who reportedly had ADHD, left high school at a young age simply to pursue mountain climbing and fell into the drug and alcohol scene that tends to materialize around people who live on the edge. The directors never let you forget that half of leading solo climbers die while pursuing their dream, but that Leclerc’s almost bizarre sense of self-containment while climbing (“filming him was terrifying, but he always seemed so relaxed”) was what made the production so irresistible. It also makes for drama that’s almost inexplicable. Leclerc was the son of working class parents who spent most of his youth just walking through the forests of British Columbia. That he eventually fell in love and spent time with a permanent girlfriend, also a climber, is seen as something of an anomaly since he wasn’t just a loner by temperament. He was preternaturally unconnected. The purpose of The Alpinist is to film him doing something he didn’t care about anyone else knowing—a climb up an impossible rock or ice face that Honnold would have likely trumpeted to the media because he needed the exposure for fund-raising. One of the uninvestigated mysteries of The Alpinist was how Leclerc supported himself. He was, in essence, a bum who lived day-to-day in order to climb. In one of the most poignant scenes, after a successful, treacherous climb in South America, he has to negotiate with a cab driver—in fluent Spanish—to get him to the airport because he’s broke. 

Patrick Imbert’s The Summit of the Gods is a more conventional mountain climbing movie since it’s based on a work of fiction written almost 30 years ago, the award-winning manga by Jiro Taniguchi and Baku Yumemakura. Imbert, a French animator, adapted the manga as a French-language ode to classic anime, but local distributors have wisely redubbed it with Japanese dialogue, since all the characters are Japanese. The basic plot is a detective story. After covering an unsuccessful climb of Mt. Everest by a Japanese mountaineering club in the 1980s, photographer Makoto Fukamachi is approached by a local in a Katmandu bar offering to sell him the small camera that was supposedly lost by British climber George Mallory in 1924. Mallory didn’t make it back and his body not found until 1999, well before the action of Summit, so it was never clear if he actually made it to the peak. Fukamachi brushes off the local and then, outside the bar in an alley, he sees the local being shaken down by a man with a missing finger. Later, he suspects that the man was Joji Habu, who, like Leclerc, was a legend within local mountaineering circles for his daring solo climbs, but after he takes on an apprentice who dies during an ascent, Habu disappeared. 

Unfortunately, the movie never really gets back on track with the Mallory mystery and wastes a lot of narrative time speculating about what happened to the British climber. Mostly, it follows Fukamachi’s pursuit of Habu, who in the meantime has been laying low in Nepal attempting his own solo ascent of the world’s highest mountain and, again like Leclerc, is not interested in anybody knowing about it. Fame isn’t in it. It’s all about the doing, and in that regard the platitudes come fast and thick and bog down the story, but Imbert’s animation is as stunning as the footage that Mortimer and Rosen achieved in The Alpinist, and because he can more readily manipulate these images, Imbert works them for maximum dramatic effect. Though I’m not a big fan of anime, what Imbert accomplishes here is stunning. To lay persons like me, the idea of climbing a mountain under the conditions depicted in The Alpinist and The Summit of the Gods is akin to fantasy of the most extraordinary type, and Imbert captures that quality perfectly.

The Alpinist is now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905).

The Alpinist home page in Japanese

The Alpinist photo (c) 2021 Red Bull Media House

The Summit of the Gods in Japanese now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905).

The Summit of the Gods home page in Japanese

The Summit of the Gods photo (c) Le Some des Dieux – 2021/Julianne Films/Folivari/Melusine Productions/France 3 Cinema/Aura Cinema

The idea of blending porn and slasher pic has surely been thought of before, but as far as I know it hadn’t been realized as a feature film, and director Ti West deserves credit for thinking through the concept with more care than others might have. First of all, he sets it in the late 70s, when porn had finally reached commercial viability and slasher films were coming into their own in a big way. He’s also quite technical about the making of the film within the film, a quickie stroker called The Farmer’s Daughter, showing how these things are actually put together, and grounds the various characters motivations in behavior that feels of and about its time. The producer, Wayne (Martin Henderson), knows his small crew well, but West makes sure his sexism shows through, even if he thinks he’s not a sexist. His girlfriend and business partner, Maxine (Mia Goth), seems to have more together as a filmmaker than he does, but, of course, she’s relegated to lesser billing both in the credits and on the set. The cameraman, RJ (Own Campbell), pretends toward being an artist, while his girlfriend, Lorraine (Jenna Ortega), who is also the sound engineer, is the only person on hand who seems to have a clear head about things in general, and at one point she asks to appear in the film performing sex, mainly to bug RJ, who clearly isn’t into it. 

The setting is the key. Wayne finds an old boarding house attached to a farm on a backroad in Texas where he plans to make the movie. The couple who own the farm are old and know nothing about the purpose of the crew’s visit, and while they’re a strange pair they don’t seem that interested in finding out at first. But when the wife, Pearl (also Goth, heavily made up), who is clearly not well, stumbles on the set and sees the actors getting it on something is triggered in her—at one point she starts moaning about how her husband can’t get it up—and she starts stalking the crew members with various farm implements. There’s also an alligator involved.

All the action takes place during one long night, but once the killings start the film loses whatever distinction it had initially offered through the porn connection. The suspense is rote and the bloodletting conventional. Even the subtext that sex can provoke murderous impulses—something that undergirds probably 90 percent of the slasher genre—seems pretty weak here, which seems like a missed opportunity. Maybe West should have just made a regular movie about creating quickie porn in the late 70s. It certainly would have been more interesting that what he ended up with. 

Opens July 8 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

X home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Over the Hill Pictures LLC