Vergeef Me

Like its more degenerate neighbor Belgium, the Netherlands has managed to produce a relatively remarkable amount of subversive and wildly idiosyncratic avant-garde and even mainstream auteur filmmakers, including Frans Zwartjes, Bas Jan Ader, Adriaan Ditvoorst, Jos Stelling, Alex van Warmerdam, Theo van Gogh, Nico B, Aryan Kaganof aka Ian Kerkhof, and Edwin Brienen, among various others. Most recently, a tall blond four-eyed chap named Cyrus Frisch aka ‘Cyrus the Great’ (Blackwater Fever, Oogverblindend aka Dazzle)—a man that could not more archetypically and banally Dutch in physical appearance—has been hailed by the Dutch press as the most subversive and iconoclastic ‘enfant terrible’ filmmaker in the Netherlands. A sort of ‘dishonest documentarian’ who cannot help but mix digital video fact with fiction, Frisch has been credited for directing the first theatrical feature-length fictional film shot on a cell-phone with his work Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me It Would Become This Bad in Afghanistan (2007), even though Aryan Kaganof was actually the first person to accomplish this with his feature SMS Sugar Man (while Kaganof’s film was not released until 2008 due to problems with the distributor, the film was actually completely in December 2005).  Frisch has utilized a number of audaciously absurd and admittedly oftentimes entertaining, if not morally retarded, gimmicks during his filmmaking career, including filming the death (!) and cremation of his mentor, Dutch film scholar Hans Saaltink, for his work k zal je leven eren... (1996) aka I Shall Honor Your Life after his comrade unexpectedly suffered a heart attack on his doorstep.  Additionally, when the Netherlands’ most influence film critic wrote regarding him and his work: “If I think of Cyrus Frisch and his films, the first word that comes to mind is: pathetic. A rebel without a cause. It’s decadence without style, as if someone is stewing in his own dirt. Not inspired by cinephilia or any other examples…it’s inventing film all over again for his own sake as a form of self-pity,” the filmmaker fought back by directing a 70-minute piece with the rather fittingly title Zelfbeklag (1995) aka Self-Pity where the auteur tries in vain to drown himself in a fish tank while the negative review of his film is recited. Unquestionably, Frisch’s greatest accomplishment thus far is the overly ambitious multi-media abortion Vergeef me (2001) aka Forgive Me, which is a sort of preposterously postmodern and obnoxiously self-reflexive play-within-a-film disguised as a documentary starring the director himself as himself, albeit with the ostensibly contrived persona of an immoral auteur who has made a Faustian pact to deliver the most devilishly degenerate, depraved, demoralizing, and dejecting film ever made. Indeed, starring a real-life cast of junkies, dipsomaniacs, ugly cripples, dirty whores and murderous mentally defective lard asses, Frisch’s fucked flick is sort of meta-media digital video diarrhea that attempts to transcend Jerry Springer, Maury Povich, and Bumfights in terms of excessive exploitation of human misery and suffering as a work that, contrary to National Socialist propaganda films, proves that the Aryan mind can be just as defective as that of the most degenerate of the Juden. 

 Directed by a mensch who once stated, “It’s only when we behave immorally that we can raise a discussion on ethics,” Forgive Me is like the Dutch equivalent to kosher confederate avant-gardist Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997), albeit taking a decidedly Dutch pseudo-deconstructionist approach as opposed to a neo-Vaudevillian montage-like approach. A longtime work-in-progress, Frisch originally showed early footage of the film at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) where, to the filmmaker’s chagrin, the piece was warmly received, so the auteur decided to up the ante in terms of aesthetic aberrance and invalid exploitation. “THE TWILIGHT ZONE of reality” as reflected in Amsterdam’s most physically and spiritually damned degenerates, Forgive Me is a dishonest piece of anti-cinematic (pseudo)honesty that attempts to be ‘ironic’ and ‘insightful’ in its meta-exploitation of invalids but it ultimately does very same that it seeks to criticize. At the beginning of the film, auteur Frisch self-righteously complains: “Can I say something? What I’m truly afraid of is that…What I think is really terrible is […] if you spend your entire life watching television and every evening at 8 o’clock you watch the news and see what there is to see every day, at 80 you end up in a home and you’re…There’s no way you can cope with that. You take in all this information and you end up totally traumatized in a home for the elderly.” When Frisch’s comrade interrupts him by stating, “But Cyrus? What do you have to add with your films? Aren’t your films just more pollution? Why do you make films?, the filmmaker retorts, “No. You don’t have to watch my movies! I’m only saying that it’s life-threatening. People need to understand! They need to see the influence of filming other people’s suffering. What it means…And the impact it has on audiences.” Messianic auteur Frisch believes, “some things should not be seen” and he decides he is going to fight back by absurdly showing things that certainly should “not be seen,” arguing that with Forgive Me, “…I’m going to make sure it doesn’t happen anymore. With this movie I’m going to go over the top! I’m going to cross the line! I’m going to cross the line of what’s acceptable!” 

 In a keenly kitschy postmodern molestation of the cinematic legacy of Teutonic master auteur F.W. Murnau, Forgive Me juxtaposes scenes from Faust (1926) with phony inter-titles of the Devil stating, “I’ll wrest the soul of Cyrus from God!” and thus the filmmaker subsequently makes his Faustian pact by introducing the motley crew of forsaken dipsomaniacs, junkies, and cripples. The first superstar introduced is hardcore middle-aged bisexual drunkard ‘Nico,’ who Frisch apparently met two years before in Amsterdam sitting in a broken down car in front of bar and liked him so much that he offered him a role in his film. Completely physically and mentally destroyed by his addiction to booze, Nico is hooked up to an IV and cannot even stand up, but that does not stop him from begging Frisch, “Please. Give me a drink…Or I can’t take the pain.” Somewhat unbelievably, during his early adult years, Nico went to college and during the very same time he was attempting to receive his graduate degree, he developed a fetish for hookers and hanging out in the Red Light District.  Nico also likes men and attempts to coerce Frisch into giving him a big sloppy kiss, but the director is simply not dedicated enough to his art to reduce himself to the level of making out with a whacked-out wino that probably has at least half a dozen STDS. Nico and his slightly less trashy but no less broken girlfriend Chiquita once appeared on a terribly trashy Dutch TV show called ‘Joy and Sorrow’ where they discussed their various erotic excursions in the Red Light District. Chiquita is a chain-smoker who once burned her house down after failing asleep with a cig in her hand and Frisch helps fuel her vice by giving her a bag full of cigarette packs upon introducing her in the film. Despite being an exhibitionist of sorts who likes appearing on trashy TV shows and flashes her tits to Frisch without him having to ask her to do so, Chiquita apparently suffers from agoraphobia. Chiquita used to date an abusive cripple named Peter Franciscus Johannes Smits, but she had to dump him after he ripped her earlobe off. Peter is proud of having the “one in ten million” disease of Ehlers–Danlos syndrome (EDS), as he says it makes him feel “special,” as he surely has nothing else to feel special about.  Peter has a nearly 11-year-old daughter that he hasn’t seen in 1 ½ years and Frisch attempts to coerce her into calling her, but he gets his ex Chiquita to do it instead, though she fails to get in contact with the little girl. 

 Arguably, the most degenerate of the lot aside from Nico is a heroin-addicted Arab cripple named Achmed, who does not seem to like his white compatriots too much and complains that Dutch drug laws are not liberal enough, self-righteously remarking from his electric scooter: “The Netherlands is a smart country, know what I mean? You can’t use drugs…but alcohol is available on every corner. That’s what I don’t understand about this society…Drugs aren’t allowed, alcohol is…Why? Cars are run over with cars. You drink like a fish, you get behind the wheel and you’re dead. And not just you. You take another with you. With drugs you only kill yourself. Maybe you lose a friend or two, but it’s your own fault.” Also unlike his friends, Achmed actually seems to care about Frisch’s film, complaining when Nico goes on a belligerent drunken rant, “I want it to be a beautiful film, and not this bickering. When you go somewhere, you don’t show up drunk.” Ultimately, all the ‘characters’ perform Frisch’s play Jezus/Liefhebber aka Jesus/Lover for a respectable bourgeois audience that would not touch the performers with a ten foot pole if their life depended on it yet have somehow been coerced in watching the novelty of seeing them in a stage-play. Needless to say, the play is a sad and pathetic joke where audiences members laugh while Chiquita nods out while mucus leaks out of her mouth and nose, a completely unclad Nico masturbates on stage and waves his member at the audience while displaying his skeletal shoah-survivor-esque body, Peter does virtually nothing while sporting a beanie and a pair of shades, and Achmed takes long and effortless drags from a cigarette in between smoking heroin backstage. Of course, the proudly demoralized bourgeois audience gives the proud performers a standing ovation because they probably feel ‘enlightened’ that they had the opportunity to watch such an ‘edgy’ play. 

 A couple years after the performance of Jesus/Lover, director Frisch decided to interview the film’s one and only true diva, Chiquita, about the aftermath of the performance and how it has affected her life. Probably to drive home the fact that the gutter diva is not all that different from certain international Dutch superstars in terms of the wanton and wayward fashion she chooses to live her life, Sylvia ‘Emmanuelle’ Kristel, herself a chain-smoker who began smoking unfiltered cigarettes at the age of 11 and died in late-2012 at the fairly young age of 60 from esophageal and lung cancer, briefly appears on stage as Chiquita’s melancholy celebrity doppelganger. As Frisch explains, while the play was a hit that described by the media as “a new kind of theatre: reality theatre” and “a whole new form of engaged theatre,” not one damn journalist, newscaster, or TV personality dared to check on the welfare of the performers, who had all sunken to an all-time low in terms of degeneracy as a result of their new celebrity. Chiquita describes how the experience made her feel that she had been “reduced to an actress” in her own life.  Notably, Frisch arrogantly complains to Chiquita, “Since then that story has become reality and I can’t stop it. I asked you to be yourselves…But you played roles. Now no one knows what’s real and what isn’t anymore. And that is the Twilight Zone of reality.” 

 Indubitably, Chiquita’s ex-beau Peter was most deeply affected by his newfound fame and when his mother berated him due to his dubious mainstream media reputation as a drug-addled mentally defective loser, he decided to get really drunk one night and ride his electric scooter off a loading ramp, thus causing him to break his back in two places. While Peter initially felt his role in Jesus/Lover was important because he believed “Insanity has elevated to norm. And that is a good thing too. Because the world is crazy,” he could not handle his new infamy, so he killed himself on January 20, 1999. As Chiquita describes regarding her ex-lover, “he was so full of life” but “all this ruined him” and “…Now he’s dead… and I always said: ‘suicide in painless’.”  Forgive Me ultimately ends with a meticulously stylized yet aesthetically vulgar and intentionally kitschy pseudo-sentimental dream-sequence featuring a Zooey Deschanel look-alike (Ellen Ten Damme) with a handgun strapped to her leg frolicking around a scenic beach in a would-be-angelic fashion. Needless to say, the pixie girl’s fun day at the beach is ruined when she happens upon destroyed American army tanks and a critically wounded Vietnam War era U.S. GI (absurdly played by Dutch-speaking junky Arab Achmed) who begs the little lady to kill him, and then goes out of character and tells Frisch to turn the camera off. After an inter-title appears reading, “Forgive…forgive me my trespasses!,” the girl shoots the GI/Achmed and the film ends. 

 After watching various annoying interviews with auteur Cyrus Frisch, I must admit that he seems like an autistic dilettante and perpetual bullshitter who wastes way too much time trying to justify his art in a groveling and less than sincere pseudo-humanist fashion in what can only be seen as a patently pathetic attempt to appeal mainstream left-wing film critics. In fact, a couple years ago Frisch started something called the “World Problems Project” where he hoped to assemble a group of international filmmakers that altruistic make films about major world problems so as to, “give a real impetus to constructive solutions,” thus reflecting the Dutch filmmaker's exceedingly exaggerated and seemingly megalomaniacal sense of importance as a serious 'artiste.'  Personally, I would have a lot more respect for Frisch if he just confessed he was a misanthropic and nihilistic psychopath and took a more stoic stance towards exploiting drunks, cripples, junkies, and human tragedy.  After all, the last thing the world needs is another artist that thinks that they can save the world.  In 2011, Frisch did a speech called “The Story of a Filmmaker Who Got Frustrated Because He Never Saved a Life” in Hong Kong for something called MaD (aka ‘Make a Difference’) where he almost breaks downs crying while complaining about how he wishes his films could save peoples’ lives and then shows a scene from his work Blackwater Fever (2008) where the seemingly ethno-masochistic protagonist of the film cries hysterically because he feels impotent in the face of saving the lives of AIDS-ridden African negroes. Of course, as Frisch’s own work Forgive Me clearly demonstrates, the Netherlands has enough of its own serious social and cultural problems for a Dutch filmmaker to feel the need to worry about the problems of the third world. Of course, as a fellow that morbidly made a film featuring the death, funeral, and cremation of his mentor and whose debut feature Forgive Me more or less resulted in the suicide of one of its subjects, Frisch’s oeuvre is probably as sincere in its supposed humanism as Kurt Gerron’s Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (1944) aka The Führer Gives the Jews a City (1944), Sergei Eisenstein’s suppressed 1937 work Bezhin Meadow (which was partially made to cover-up the 1932-1933 Soviet genocidal famine Holodomor), and Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997). Indeed, I am sure Frisch was laughing to himself when he came up with the title for Forgive Me, as he is a sort of Geraldo Rivera of the Dutch avant-garde film world, albeit minus the superficial charm and charisma. Unquestionably, culturally deracinated western liberal democracies are great at producing autistic and psychopathic individuals and Frisch is just as much a product of contemporary Holland as the anti-superstars of Forgive Me.  Had Frisch lived in the Netherlands during an earlier era before the emergence of a morally bankrupt welfare state that pays for trannys to get sex changes (!), he might have grown up to be a Calvinist minister as reflected in his mostly flat affect.  Indeed, while I enjoyed Forgive Me to some extent, I certainly find Frisch more disturbing than any of his works.

-Ty E

Lacombe, Lucien

With my recent viewing and somewhat surprised enjoyment of his soothingly somber suicide masterpiece Le feu follet (1963) aka The Fire Within, I decided checkout some more works directed by famed frog filmmaker Louis Malle (Les Amants aka The Lovers, My Dinner with Andre), whose works I find to be either hit or miss, not to mention oftentimes obscenely overrated, thus leading me to the admittedly quite masterful French-West German-Italian co-production Lacombe, Lucien (1974). Notable for being one of the first French films to deal with the subject of collaboration with the Gestapo during the Second World War in a fairly serious and reasonably objective non-partisan fashion, Malle’s nearly 140-minute wartime epic depicts the fast rise and equally swift fall of a seemingly half-retarded 17-year-old peasant boy as played by a real-life peasant boy who joins the Milice française—a blackshirted paramilitary force created on January 30, 1943 by the Vichy regime that fought and hunted down members of the resistance—after he is rejected by the resistance, only to fall hopelessly in love with a conspicuously cultivated blonde-haired and blue-eyed Parisian Jewess that is hiding out in a decrepit apartment with her wealthy yet wimpy tailor father and sassy non-French-speaking grandma. Co-penned by half-Hebraic Nobel Prize winning novelist Patrick Modiano—a man whose Sephardic Jewish father curiously regularly hung around with the Gestapo during the Vichy era after most Parisian Jews had already been sent to concentration camps—and directed by an avowed left-wing filmmaker and philo-Semite who went out of his way to mock the dissident far-right paramilitary organization OAS in his masterpiece The Fire Within, Lacombe, Lucien is, relatively speaking, a fairly objective work for its kind as a film that never would or could be made today in ultra-philo-Semitic frogland and that, somewhat shockingly, hardly ever succumbs to vomit-worthy sermonizing, hence why the film was considered controversial and even offensive by some, including Judaic agitpropagandist Marcel Ophüls (who apparently bitched about the film to Malle's brother), upon its release. Originally entitled Le faucon aka The Falcon and set in present-day Mexico, Malle’s work might not be the classic it is today were it not for the fact that the filmmaker was unable to film in Mexico, as the director and his kosher co-writer were forced to rethink and rework the entire film as a result, ultimately making it infinitely more provocative by setting it in one of France’s most infamously disgraceful periods in history as a once great empire that found themselves to be the groveling cuckolds of their perennial enemy, the Teutons. Featuring an ambiguous antihero who despite his rather low IQ and brazenly boorish behavior is fairly unpredictable and morally anomalous, Lacombe, Lucien stars a “real-life Provençal farm boy” named Pierre-Marc Blaise who originally worked as a woodcutter and was chosen over 1,000 other prospective actors despite the fact that he had never acted in his entire life. As the son of a rich industrialist, Malle certainly demonstrates in the film his seeming love-hate intrigue for anti-intellectual peasants who are one with the earth and nature and always rely on their instincts over their intellect, as the eponymous lead (the title is in reference to the bureaucratic ‘fascist’ way the protagonist introduces himself) is a sort of half-man/half-beast who is in his element in the wild but becomes a coldblooded killer and borderline psychopath when given power over other people by the Gestapo. 

 It is June 1944 Vichy France and Lucien Lacombe (Pierre Blaise) is a black-haired 17-year-old boy from the small southwestern French village of Souleillac who lives a remarkably mundane life involving mopping floors at a Catholic retirement home in between senselessly killing cute songbirds with his slingshot, shooting wild game, and plucking chicken, which he kills with a karate chop to the neck.  While Lucien’s father is in a POW camp, his mother takes it upon herself to start an affair with her boss and rents their family home out to a rather dirty sub-peasant family with a dozen or so small half-clothed children, so the protagonist decides he wants to join the resistance and brings the local leader, a seemingly pompous school teacher named Robert Peyssac (Jean Bousquet) that is known as ‘Lieutenant Voltaire’ by his comrades, a dead rabbit as a gift in the hopes of letting him join, but he is told that he is “too young” and that “the underground is not like poaching.” While riding his bike back to the old folk’s home late one night, Lucien spots a fancy hotel called ‘Hotel Des Grottes’ where a wild party is raging on and before he knows it, the protagonist is busted for snooping around the place and taken inside. Hotel Des Grottes is local headquarters for the so-called ‘German police’ aka Milice française and Lucien is accused of spying and roaming around outside after Nazi-ordained curfew, but when he recognizes and compliments the bartender Henri Aubert (Pierre Decazes)—a somewhat effete ex-professional cyclist with a beer belly who he saw win a race in 1939 in Caussade—the French collaborators decide he is harmless and begin plying him with alcohol to see if he knows anything about the local resistance. Before he knows it, Lucien is thoroughly intoxicated and ratting out Monsieur Peyssac aka ‘Lieutenant Voltaire’—the mensch who rejected the protagonist's plea to join the resistance—to the frog Gestapo.  Lucien is so ignorant about politics, that he tells the German police that Peyssac is purportedly a Freemason and then asks them, “What’s a Freemason?,” which causes them all to chuckle.  After Lucien runs his mouth, Peyssac is arrested and tortured, but that protagonist does not seem too concerned, as the German police give him a job and he ultimately becomes their youngest, and certainly one of their most ruthless, members.

 Before he knows it, Lucien becomes a stoic soldier and coldblooded killer who is willing to do any and everything he is told, as he finds most of the work to be fun, even hunting rabbits while engaging in gun battles with members of the resistance, and seems to have no idea of the moral or political magnitude of his actions.  Indeed, the protagonist loves his job as it gives him power over members of the upper-classes and the job pays fairly well, not to mention the fact that it features a fairly generous benefit package that includes, among other things, “war loot” (valuables taken from enemies) and a unending flow of expensive hard liquor and aged wine.  Indeed, Lucien has no idea how good and cultivated the wine he is drinking, but his comrades let him know.  Lucien is taken under the wing of a charming yet seemingly psychopathic opportunistic aristocrat named Jean-Bernard de Voisins (Stéphane Bouy) who owns a gentle giant of a cow-colored Great Dane and who dates a slutty redhead hack actress named Betty Beaulieu (Loumi Iacobesco).  Among other things, Betty gets a narcissistic sense of joy out of giving Lucien an autographed photo of herself and loves running her mouth about the most pointless and shallow things, even openly remarking in front of her blueblood beau and his comrades how she thinks British Jewish actor Leslie Howard, himself an anti-Nazi propagandist who died under dubious circumstances in 1943, is more attractive than Frenchmen. Jean-Bernard is all in it from the money and power as demonstrated by the fact that he sells forged papers to a disgraced wealthy Jewish tailor of the Yiddish-speaking sort named Albert Horn (Austrian-Swedish Bergman actor Holger Löwenadler)—a disillusioned fellow that has broken by the war and spends most of his time lying around in a fancy robe—who lives with his elderly non-French-speaking mother (German Jewish actress Therese Giehse, who Malle dedicated his 1975 work Black Moon to) and a beauteous Paris-born blonde daughter symbolically named ‘France’ (Aurore Clément of Wim Wenders Paris, Texas (1984)). While Lucien initially begins a romantic relationship with a peasant girl with a lazy eye named Marie that works as a maid at German police headquarters, he more or less falls in love with France at first sight. Needless to say, cultivated Jew Albert Horn is not happy when a borderline retarded low-class fascist goy cop begins regularly hounding his dainty daughter, who is a piano prodigy of sorts who blew her chance at going to a conservatory because she had fallen in love with a boy. Indeed, commie killer by day, Lucien soon finds himself in an inexplicable situation at night while attempting to vie for the attention and affection of a Jewess by bringing her and her family various gifts, including flowers, expensive wine, jewelry (or what the protagonist calls “war loot”), cash and other scarce items that they could not get otherwise. Due to his lack of manners, poor and oftentimes strange manner of speech (France is perplexed by the fact that Lucien constantly calls her “my dear” despite the fact he does not even know her), and overall lack of sophistication, France oftentimes finds herself laughing at Lucien, but he will ultimately have the last laugh after managing to get in her kosher panties. 

 Aside from a staunch and insanely idealistic Hitlerite named Faure (René Bouloc)—a bitter and less than educated fellow who believes Jews breed like rate (any self-respecting anti-Semite knows that the Jewish population rarely grows)—virtually none of the members of the German police really believe in the National Socialist cause, with a smooth-talking negro bartender named Hippolyte (Pierre Saintons) even being among their ranks. While the boss of the group, Inspector Tonin (Jean Rougerie), became a member of the German police after being fired from the regular French police in 1936 for being an “undesirable,” Jean-Bernard joined up because he is an unscrupulous opportunist who is willing to do whatever it takes to maintain his distinguished life of aristocratic luxury. Protagonist Lucien more or less unwittingly joined up, but it does not take him long to realize he enjoyed the power and privilege it afforded him as a lowly peasant who got to humiliate and persecute the bourgeois class that he felt humiliated and persecuted him (rather revealingly, Lucien oftentimes says to his enemies, “I don’t like people talking down to me”). Using his easy-to-abuse power as a kraut-backed cop, Lucien somewhat absurdly threatens to take Monsieur Horn to the Gestapo if he refuses to allow him to take his daughter France to a dance party at fascist headquarters, stating, “If France does not come, I’ll take you to my friends…and some of my friends are not too fond of Jews.” To protect her father, France goes against his wishes and goes with Lucien to the decadent Gestapo dance, but problems arise when the protagonist's date dances with other men because he does not know how to dance. After his comrade Jean-Bernard reveals that he is leaving for Spain and remarks in reference to France, “Some Jewish girls are so very beautiful...They make other women look like old hags. I had a Jewish fiancée once. Incredibly stacked and very rich,” Lucien gets extremely enraged and manhandles his friend Aubert for dancing with his date. After Lucien forces her out of the dance hall in a rough fashion and breaks the heel of one of her shoes in the process, France plays peacemaker and says to him, “It’s a shame you can’t dance…I’ll teach you” and begins slow-dancing with him, but their would-be-romantic moment does not last long because the protagonist's exceedingly jealous hotheaded maid girlfriend Marie sees them, yells, “Filthy Jew! They all have syphilis,” and threatens to tell the Germans about the Jewess. While Marie is being restrained, France runs upstairs and hides in a bathroom where she sobs hysterically in the dark. Of course, Lucien eventually finds her there and comforts her by rubbing her hair. After crying “I’m tired of being a Jew,” the two begin kissing and ultimately make love. Indeed, a cultivated Jewess finds herself engaged in coitus with a borderline retarded farm-boy, but such are the strange and seemingly unlikely acts of desperation that wars spawn. 

 Needless to say when dapperly dressed Hebrew Monsieur Horn discovers that his pretty progeny has slept with a dimwitted peasant collaborator who has been routinely taunting his family with his aggressive and boorish behavior, he blows a gasket and calls France a “whore,” so Lucien threatens to give him a “thrashing.” Of course, the entire situation pushes Horn over the edge and he finally gets the gall to stroll around in public in a fancy suit like he did before the war instead of sitting inside all day in a robe like he usually does, stating that, “I feel like my old self.” Horn wants Lucien to help him and his daughter France escape to Spain, but when he asks him about talking to him “man to man” about the issue, the protagonist blows him off. In a rather drastic attempt to get Lucien’s attention, Monsieur Horn absurdly goes to Gestapo headquarters and is caught by rabid anti-Semite Faure, who predictably sends him on a train to Toulouse. When Lucien informs France of what happened to her father and says “it was his own fault,” she freaks out and starts hitting him, so he calms her down by raping her. Things are not going too well with the ‘German police’ either as virtually every single one of them, including the black bartender, are killed one night while Lucien was guarding a prisoner upstairs. With all his comrades dead, Lucien decides to betray his masters by killing an SS SD man when he comes to round up France and her granny. After that, Lucien drives France and granny south, though their car breaks down on the way, so they are forced to take refuge in abandoned old shack. While living in the countryside, Lucien reverts back to his old and more simple farm-boy ways, which comes in handy, as he is able to provide France and her grandmother was tons of freshly killed meat. Aside from being rather repulsed by armies of ants climbing up her leg, cosmopolitan Parisian Jewess France seems to adapt well to the country and even seems to fall in love with Lucien to some degree (though there is one ambiguous scene where she holds a rock over his head as if she wants to kill Lucien). Indeed, everything seems idyllic until an inter-tile juxtaposed with a shot of Lucien lying in a relaxed fashion in a meadow reveals that the protagonist was arrested on October, 12 1944, given a show trial by the Resistance, and swiftly executed via firing squad. 

 Tragically, Lacombe, Lucien lead Pierre Blaise died less than two years after the release of the film while driving a car, a Renault 17 Gordini, he had bought with the money he earned for the handful of films he had starred in, thereupon somewhat ironically facing a deplorable fate that was not all that unlike the eponymous character he played in Malle’s film in that he perished before ever getting to develop into a full man and experiencing everything that life has to offer. In the book Malle on Malle (1993) edited by Philip French, Malle stated regarding Blaise: “…he was very much of a rebel, and somewhat of a social outcast, although he came from a great family. I still see his parents. He died in a car accident two years after the film. I loved him dearly. He had no conventional culture whatever: he had never seen a film in his life, had never been to a cinema. Not only had he never seen a camera, but he’s never been to a movie! And never read a book.” Indeed, a sub-literate farm-boy who had never seen a single film in his entire life managed to give one of the most idiosyncratically memorable acting performances of post-WWII French cinema. When it came to karate-chopping the heads of chickens or chugging liquor, Malle relied on Blaise’s experience as a rural lumpenprole to give a certain authenticity to his film, or as the director stated: “One of the difficulties from me with LACOMBE, LUCIEN was that I knew very little about the character since he was someone whose social background was the opposite of mine […] Pierre Blaise was helpful. And I always followed his instinct. I would watch him very carefully and I could see when he was uncomfortable with a line or situation.” One of the major themes of the film is Hannah Arendt’s idea of the ‘Banality of Evil’ yet Blaise brought intrigue and mystique to this so-called ‘evil’ which Malle summed up as follows: “In a way, you could look at him as the ultimate villain, but at the same time he was incredibly moving, as he was discovering power and money and how you can humiliate people who have been humiliating you for years. Pierre Blaise was so good, he got me into trouble. A lot of people saw the film almost as an apology for a collaborator because Blaise was so moving and disturbing that you could not completely hate him.” 

 Arguably the director’s most Bressonian effort as a work where the lead was “subconsciously” (as Malle once described it) inspired by the teenage collaborator François Jost played by Charles Le Clainche in Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (1956) aka A Man Escaped, as well as a strangely tender celluloid affair that features a serene pastoral naturalism that recalls Au hasard Balthazar (1966), Lacombe, Lucien is surely Malle at his best, even if it is not as immaculate as The Fire Within, but of course one expects a certain amount of imperfection for such an ambitious film. While featuring a certain amount of realism and naturalism in terms of it's use of non-actors and depiction of real animal killings, the film also has a certain oneiric quality that makes it feel like it is set in a sort of alternate reality even though it was inspired by much historical research. The only other French Vichy era film I can think that has a similar quality is Michel Mardore’s The Savior (1971) aka Le sauveur starring as Horst Buchholz as a German officer who pretends to be an English paratrooper and uses his psychopathic charms to seduce a cutesy yet busty 14-year-old blonde played by Muriel Catalá so that he can eradicate every single person in her village. Of course, Lacombe, Lucien is a much more intricate and morally ambiguous work, hence the public outcry various intellectuals and film critics, or as Malle stated regarding the response to the film: “People who had lived through that period knew that this film was completely true and honest about what actually happened. And people who were not French took it for what it was: a reflection on the nature of evil. The controversy was between French intellectuals and politicians. Those who attacked the film did it on the grounds that it was fiction; we had invented and put on the screen a character who was complex and ambiguous to the point where his behavior was acceptable. For them, it justified collaboration – which certainly is not what I was trying to do.” Not surprisingly, French Jewish documentarian Marcel Ophüls was apparently “shocked” by the film’s ambiguity, but of course unlike The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) aka Le Chagrin et la pitié—a work that even Jewish French minister Simone Veil, herself a Auschwitz survivor, felt was too biased and played a major role in having the doc banned from French television until 1981—and Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), Malle’s work depicts the intricacies regarding French collaborators and does not proselytize about the evils of collaborators and Nazi and the supreme righteousness about the resistance. To Ophüls’ minor credit, I found the eponymous hero of Malle’s work to be more likeable than any of the resistance fighters in the film. Of course, as people seem to hate to admit, both the resistance and the collaborators were comprised of gangs of ruthless killers and had the Second World War ended differently, the former group would now be regarded as bloodthirsty butchers and the latter would be regarded as European heroes instead of the other way around.  Indeed, I'm sure the French resistance had its fair share of Luciens, as well as Dirlewangers, but no contemporary French filmmaker has the testicular fortitude to depict such a figure, so Lacombe, Lucien acts as the next best thing.

-Ty E

Oslo, August 31st

Since France has always led Europe in terms of collective degeneracy, especially in the cultural, social, and artistic realm, it is only natural that they would adapt a decadent novel about four decades before any Nordic filmmaker would ever dare to touch it, but then again, the book in question is also French. Indeed, the great French dandy turned literary fascist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s addiction-and-suicide-themed novel Le feu follet (1931) aka Will O' the Wisp was originally adapted by famed frog filmmaker Louis Malle (Lacombe, Lucien, My Dinner with Andre) as the melancholy classic Le feu follet (1963) aka The Fire Within starring the somberly suave Maurice Ronet, so it seems somewhat strange and almost inexplicable that a contemporary Norwegian auteur would also cinematically adapt a book inspired by the suicide of a largely forgotten real-life Dadaist poet some 80 years after the work was written, but relatively young auteur Joachim Trier (Reprise, Louder Than Bombs)—a more restrained long distance relative of Danish eternal ‘enfant terrible’ Lars von Trier—did just that for his second feature-length film Oslo, August 31st (2011) aka Oslo, 31. august.  Though Malle and Trier's films are superficially similar in terms of plot and storyline in their depiction of the last day or so of a recovering drug addict who decides to commit suicide after having various less than ideal encounters with old friends, aesthetically speaking, the two works have virtually nothing in common and certainly make for great comparison pieces in terms of how much European cinema has changed over the past four decades or so.  The works are also quite similar in that the central city where the story is set is a sort unofficial guiding character that is only secondary to the protagonist, especially in Trier's film, as the seemingly living metropolis seems to have sucked the soul out every single person in the film to one degree or another, but especially the hopelessly forlorn lead, who has come to the bitter conclusion that, “I'm 34 years old. I've got nothing” and decides to take decisive action for one of the first times in his perennially stagnating life. Having more in common with Drieu’s source novel in that the protagonist is a H-shooting junky instead of an alcoholic (the protagonist of the novel was addicted to opium, which was considered old-fashioned during the early 1960s when Malle made his film), Oslo, August 31st depicts one man’s losing fight with a deadly drug that has been eating at the Nordic world and white world in general since the late-1960s, but has become even worse since the growing popularity of narcotic prescription painkillers over the past could decades. Indeed, I can think of at least two pill popper turned dope fiend ex-friends of mine who died after overdosing on the Big H, but it is unclear to me as to whether either the two intended to die, though another ex-friend of mine who did survive admitted to me that he did it intentionally. What is arguably most interesting and original about Trier’s film compared to Malle’s is that the protagonist is depicted as more or less a casualty of a leftist academic upbringing as a fellow with a mother who “held a tolerant view on drugs” and a physically weak pansy father who “said people who valued military experience were dull.” Shot in a quasi-realist handheld style the falls somewhere in between Gus van Sant’s Elephant (2003) and the work of Philippe Grandrieux (Sombre, La vie nouvelle aka A New Life), Oslo, August 31st is certainly a bummer of film that lacks the refined eloquence and cultivation of Malle’s The Fire Within, yet its sterile and primitive aesthetic certainly reflect the lack of poetry, culture, warmth, love, and life that both contemporary Oslo and Occidental metropolises in general lack, thus reflecting our devastatingly decadent, spiritually bankrupt, and emotionally glacial zeitgeist. 

 Oslo, August 31st begins with a quasi-nostalgic montage featuring vintage footage of Oslo over the past three decades or so (the protagonist is 34) juxtaposed with various faceless and nameless citizens discussing what they remember most about the city, stating mostly mundane things like “I remember how tall the trees seemed compared to those in Northern Norway” and “We moved to the city. We felt extremely mature,” thus giving the viewer the feeling that the utopian dream has died in the Nordic metropolis. Protagonist Anders (played by childhood actor turned physician Anders Danielsen Lie, who also starred in Trier’s first feature Reprise) does not seem like he has many happy memories of Oslo even though he is a self-described “spoiled brat” who had a rather comfortable, if not deleteriously liberal, upbringing, but then again he has spent the last ten months living as an impatient at a drug rehabilitation center so he could wean himself off various narcotics, especially heroin and alcohol. Anders had been given an “evening pass” from the clinic, so he decided to use it to go have sex with a Swedish chick named Malin (Malin Crépin) instead of meeting up with his estranged sister Nina as he had originally planned. After sex, Anders just stares into space and when unclad Malin wakes up and smiles at him, he cannot bring himself to smile back because, as he later tells a friend regarding the anti-climatic carnal experience, “I wasn’t quite there. I felt nothing.”  As is quite clear by his melancholy demeanor, Anders no longer enjoys the hedonistic activities that used to make his life worth living, hence his disillusionment with life in general. After leaving Maline’s apartment, Anders walks to a nearby forest, fills his pants and jacket pockets with tons of rocks, picks up a large boulder, and somewhat absurdly attempts to drown himself in a nearby lake, but he botches the job and then proceeds to cry hysterically upon emerging from the water. Unfortunately for Anders, he has to go back to the rehabilitation center and keep up a charade of seeming to have the semblance of a sound of mind for at least one more day before he ends his life for good. 

 On the last day of his life, Anders plans to do at least two things: meet with his sister and go to a job interview. Not surprisingly, both of these plans fail miserably, thus reinforcing the protagonist’s undying desire to off himself. In between the interview and attempting to meet up with his sister, Anders attempts to reconnect with some old friends who he has not seen since he became a full-blown junky and they kicked him out of their lives. After being given a ‘day pass’ to leave the clinic, Anders takes a taxi to Oslo and swings by the apartment of his old best friend Thomas (Hans Olav Brenner), who could not have a more different place in his life as a straight and somber bourgeois family man and pedantic academic professor who quotes Proust during personal conversations as if he has been completely zapped of any genuine personality. Married to a beauteous blond babe named Rebecca (Norwegian singer Ingrid Olava) that he has two young daughters with, Thomas does not really know how to talk to Anders about his problems and even absurdly jokingly describes him as a “drug troll” to his prepubescent daughter after she creates a crude drawing of the protagonist. When Anders describes his soulless sex with Malin, Thomas nonsensically replies, “Proust said, ‘Trying to understand desire by watching a nude woman is like a child taking apart a clock to understand time,’” so his wife Rebecca berates him for not only pretentiously quoting Proust during a highly personally conversation, but also for saying something that is the exact opposite of what his comrade expressed. When Thomas mentions that he recently saw Anders’ parents and remarks, “They still seem so much in love, attentive, like a model couple,” the protagonist confesses that his parents had to sell their house so they could pay for him to go to drug rehab.

 When the two friends go for a walk, Anders hints at his plans to commit suicide, stating to Thomas, “…it’s not about heroin, not really. Look at me. I’m 34 years old. I have nothing. I can’t start from scratch. Don’t you understand?” When Thomas mentions to Anders that he has more options than most of the people at his rehab center, he cynically, “Yeah, but they are happy to work in a warehouse and have kids with some ex-raver.” Indeed, Anders is a bourgeois failure who physically and emotionally resembles a wigger low-life and he could never submit to a loser working-class lumpenprole life of mediocrity, as he considers it a fate worse than death. When Anders says, “If that’s how it ends, it’s a choice I’ve made” regarding his intention to overdose on dope, emotionally autistic academic Thomas seems somewhat baffled and replies, “I can’t relate to you tell me you’re planning to commit suicide.” As for Thomas, his life is not exactly as perfect as it seems as he virtually never has sex, no longer has the desire to write, and spends his free time passively watching his wife defeating players while playing Playstation games, which he describes as “the best part” of his banal and highly domesticated life. After parting ways with Thomas, Anders heads to his job interview with nice and smug magazine editor David (Øystein Røger), which seems to go good at first, at least until when the protagonist is asked why he does not have a work history after 2005 and he admits that he is a recovering drug addict. When David asks Anders what kind of drug addict he was, he replies, “Just about anything…Cocaine, ecstasy, alcohol…Heroin as well. I was dealing a bit as well. Should I put that on my CV?” and then reveals he has been clean for ten months. When David patronizingly replies, “Not many people manage to get through that. So that’s…Extraordinary,” Anders gets angry and acts rather self-destructively by demanding his resume back, storming out of the building, and trashing his resume.  Indeed, Anders' self-esteem is about as low as that of a crack-smoking American ghetto negro.

 When Anders goes to a restaurant to meet his sister Nina, he attempts to call an ex-girlfriend, Iselin, who he has been trying to contact throughout the entire day, but he has no luck.  After waiting forever, Nina's friend Tove (Tone Beate Mostraum) shows up instead of his sister, which rather angers Anders, who gets the keys to his family home from the girl and leaves. Apparently, Anders’ sister Nina is afraid of the fact that he will be getting out of the rehab center soon and could not bring herself to confront her big bad druggy bro. After spending hours wandering around various parks in Oslo whilst thinking about his pretentious liberal intellectual parents’ somewhat deleterious parenting skills (in his mind, he never references his parents as ‘mom’ or ‘dad’ but instead ‘she’ and ‘he,’ thus reflecting the cold, sterile, and detached nature of his relationship with them), Anders heads to a party at his friends Mirjam (Kjærsti Odden Skjeldal) and Calle’s apartment where he finds himself feeling increasingly lonely and detached being around so many old friends who, unlike the protagonist, all have things going on in their lives. Anders used to date Mirjam and during the party he decides to talk to her after seeing her sitting all by her lonesome and looking rather lonely. Mirjam is depressed that her birthday is tomorrow and complains, “It’s a bit easier for you guys to reach the thirties. Look at your pals. None of them have girlfriends their own age. My flat’s full of girls I don’t know. 20-year-olds with perky tits,” so Anders attempts to cheer her up by stating, “Your tits seem pretty perky to me.” Although having been together for nine years, Mirjam and her boyfriend still do not have kids and she is feeling fed up with the banality of life, which the protagonist can surely relate to. Of course, things get awkward when Anders kisses Mirjam in a sensual fashion, so she goes somewhere else. Depressed about Iselin not returning his calls, among other things, Anders decides he needs to buy enough heroin to kill himself with so he robs the coats and purses of the party guests, but unfortunately Mirjam walks in on him doing it and looks at him disapprovingly, though she does not confront him. 

 Ultimately, Anders decides to buy a gram of heroin from his drug dealer friend and then spends the rest of the night partying with his degenerate mustached pal Petter (Petter Width Kristiansen) and two young and dumb college girls in their early twenties. While Anders flirts with one of the girls, he is far too detached and dejected to seriously pursue her, even telling her that their night together is more or less meaningless, stating, “No, no, you’ll have a thousand nights like this one. You won’t remember this…Everything will be forgotten.” While at a bar, Anders spots a guy named Øystein (Anders Borchgrevink) who slept with his ex-girlfriend Iselin when they were still together, so taking what he learned at drug rehab, he absurdly decides to ‘forgive him.’ Needless to say, Anders' meager attempt at atonement does not go well, with Øystein letting him really have it by stating, “I don’t know you…But I’ve seen the consequences of how you treat people close to you […] whether I slept with her or not, I mean, does it matter? [...] I don’t have to listen to this. I have friends far worse off than you…But they don’t act like assholes. And this isn’t about…the fact that you’re an addict.” Shocked by the fact that a virtual stranger has more or less summed up his shitty loser character, Anders salutes Øystein in a sarcastic fashion and heads to a local rave with Petter and the two chicks where they spend the rest of the night getting drunk and acting stupid. When the sun rises, they all head to a closed pool and everyone gets in except Anders. Indeed, not even the prospect of a hot topless 20-something-year-old who wants to jump his bones can get Anders into the pool. While Petter and the girls are having fun in the pool, Anders randomly walks away without saying goodbye and heads to his empty childhood home where he plays piano for a bit, leaves Iselin a voicemail telling her to ignore everything he said previously, and then shoots up enough heroin to stop his heart from beating within mere seconds. 

 It should be noted that long before he became a filmmaker, Oslo, August 31st director Joachim Trier was a top Norwegian skateboarder who, not unlike Harmony Korine, originally intended to become a pro-skater. Unlike Korine, Trier actually had the talent to become pro but fate had much different plans for him and he blossomed into one of Norway's most interesting contemporary filmmakers. Ultimately, both filmmakers where obviously influence by the gritty aesthetics of skate videos, albeit in somewhat different ways, with Oslo, August 31st certainly reflecting the sort of  shaky, erratic, and voyeuristic ‘realist’ handheld digital video essence of modern sk8 tapes. As anyone who has ever been seriously involved with the so-called ‘extreme sport’ will tell you, skaters look at the physical world, especially urban areas, in a completely different way than non-skaters and I have to admit that as an ex-skater, I felt that Trier’s film oftentimes feels like it could have been filmed in between skate sessions in Oslo with the director’s friends and family. More importantly, the film demonstrates how the city is a sort of soul-draining and socially alienating postmodern pandemonium of sorts that makes it impossible for anyone with any sort of vices to live in peace and harmony. It is interesting to note that, aside from the suicidal protagonist, virtually every other character in the film is either depressed and/or drug addicted as well and everyone seems to be too consumed with their own lingering dejection to bother to notice that their friend is about to engage in self-slaughter.  Undoubtedly, Trier's film does not make for the most enjoyable of filmic experiences as a sort of cinematic condemnation of the modern era that offers no solutions, not relief, and, arguably most importantly, no redemption to abject hopelessness of the modern world. For me, it is nearly impossible to think of Oslo, August 31st without comparing it to it's French predecessor The Fire Within, as the two make perfect companion pieces when attempting to distinguish the innate soullessness and cultural and social retardation of today with the eloquence, cultivation, and cultivation of yesteryear. Indeed, even the dope fiends and dipsomaniacs of Malle’s film seem dignified compared to the Nordic bourgeois nihilist slobs of Trier’s film, which features a protagonist that, unlike the character played by Maurice Ronet, seems devoid of even the most rudimentary virtues as a completely charmless chap who probably did himself and everyone else a favor by shooting a lethal dose of Cocteau's kick into his scrawny arm. Also, seeing a bunch of towelheaded camel jockeys walking around Oslo is not exactly a pleasant sight to see, thus reflecting the racial and cultural suicide of the Norwegian people in general (notably, in 2013, 40% of Oslo's elementary school pupils were registered as having a first language other than Norwegian or Sami, which indicates almost half of the city's adolescent population is foreign and thus will replace the indigenous population in a couple generations). Indeed, it certainly a sign that something is wrong when young upper-class whites are suicidal junkies while Arabs are sucking on the supple teat of the inexplicably generous Nordic welfare state.  Of course, as the protagonist of the film states himself, he is a brat who refuses to accept anything other than a life of upper-middleclass luxury as a decidedly decadent young man who is a direct product of a lazy liberal upbringing, hence why he did not even have the testicular fortitude to off himself like a man like the protagonist of Malle's film and instead takes the easy way out with a pleasurable narcotizing death that is surely symbolic of his life in general as a self-destructive hedonist.  Degenerate bourgeois liberal upbringing or not, Oslo, August 31st is surely the last film you should watch if you're a recovering addict.

-Ty E