¡Qué horror! 2012

Candidate # 31

CHAINED

(August 2012)

Now, for those of you who frequent the Iguana, you might have noticed that I loves me my David Lynch.

“But what about his daughter, Jennifer Lynch?” you may well ask.

Fine.

The Jennifer Lynch Scorecard:

I wasn’t overly fond of her feature debut, Boxing Helena, but I was blown away by her second feature, Surveillance, so much so that it ended up on the ¡Qué Horror! 2009 list.

While I appreciate her efforts on her Bollywood foray, Hisss, that turned out to be something of a mess. (I’m still waiting to get a shot at seeing the documentary of that film’s tumultuous production, Despite the Gods.)

And now, we come to Chained.

In the past year, where, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve seen quite a number of excellent serial killer thrillers, Chained stands out because while it does feature a serial killer (Vincent D’Onofrio, as if playing Carl Stargher in Tarsem’s The Cell simply just wasn’t enough creeptastic serial killer fun for one lifetime), it’s really about the bizarre and twisted relationship that develops between the killer and the nine-year-old boy who he takes into his “care” after slaughtering the child’s mother (played briefly by Lynch’s Surveillance star, Julia Ormond).

There’s a searing disquiet that runs through Chained’s 94-minute-running time that plays far more effectively than lesser productions’ oozing buckets of fake blood and gore.

As with Surveillance, Lynch takes a pre-existing script (this one written by Damian O’Donnell) and makes it her own, tapping into the sordid psyches of her characters, flaying them onscreen, so we’re witness to not just their heinous actions, but also, the tatters and shreds of their motivations.

This is a disturbingly bleak title (all the way up to the haunting end credits roll) that plays almost like a blazingly defiant “Up yours!” to the whole Hisss debacle.

Here’s hoping Lynch keeps on keepin’ on…

(Chained OS courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com.)

THE FALL
(Review)


All right. Full disclosure.
I love Tarsem’s The Cell. It has its flaws, yes, but it’s got a whole lot of amazing, noteworthy stuff going for it.
There’s Howard Shore’s score, there’s Eiko Ishioka’s costumes, and of course, Tarsem’s very particular visual flair.
So it was that in the wake of The Cell, I began to actively track his possible feature film work. There was a moment in time when his name was associated with the then-in development Constantine, though that ultimately didn’t happen, due, in part, to what he fondly calls “this autistic child of mine,” The Fall.
And now, here we are, some four years and 24 countries later (the story behind the making of the film is equally as interesting as the film itself), and that “autistic child” is now ready to receive guests…


Following a haunting opening credits sequence in which many clues to the subsequent narrative may be found, we find ourselves in Los Angeles, once upon a time (or the early 1920’s, take your pick), as the paths of 5-year old Alexandria (an impressively unaffected Catinca Untaru) and injured Hollywood stuntman Roy Walker (Pushing Daisies’ Lee Pace), cross due to a misdirected message.
What follows is a tender friendship born out of necessity, a poignant celebration of the power of storytelling, and a breathtaking display of Singh’s artistry and passion.
Those who may have mistakenly written off the baroque imagery of The Cell as a barrage of hollow, MTV-styled trifles, would be well-advised to seek out the heartbreaking wonders of The Fall.


Helping Tarsem author this astounding piece of cinematic wonder are a returning Ishioka (who first impressed me deeply with her work on Paul Schrader’s Mishima, and then blew me away with her Oscar-winning efforts on Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula), first-time feature cinematographer Colin Watkinson, editor Robert Duffy (who’d also worked on The Cell), production designer Ged Clarke, and composer Krishna Levy (also responsible for the music of François Ozon’s Huit Femmes).
And of course, the central performances of Pace and Untaru, which anchor the narrative in a very human space, giving the film and its fantastic visuals, the beating heart any good story requires.
Many of today’s crop of feature directors with their roots in music videos and adverts seem much too preoccupied with framing the pretty pictures without paying enough attention to the narrative. With The Fall, Tarsem safely joins the likes of Mark Romanek, David Fincher, and Spike Jonze, as directors who are as much storytellers as they are visualists. (Incidentally, Fincher and Jonze are producers on The Fall, “presenting” the film to us, its eager audience.)


With his autistic child, Tarsem took home, not only a Crystal Bear from last year’s Berlin International Film Festival, but also the award for Best Film from Sitges, considered by some as the Cannes of genre film.
The Fall is a moving, breathtaking tale about the unbridled, impressionable imagination of the young, and how reality and fiction can bleed into each other in a child’s mind.
It’s also about stories, as both lifeline and currency. It’s about their mutability and elasticity, of their organic nature; how the listener can shape the story even as it unfolds. How, in the end, the story is as much the listener’s as it is the storyteller’s, and how the listener can, in influencing the story, also influence the storyteller in turn.
It’s a daring and wondrous piece of work, The Fall, and anyone who loves stories (as any film geek should), really does need to see this.


Parting shot: The Living and the Dead’s Leo Bill is here as Charles Darwin, as you’ve never seen him before…
Really.

(The Fall OS courtesy of impawards.com [design by The Arterie]; images courtesy of moviereporter.net and premiere.com.)