Wednesday, September 13, 2023

Wild Horses Couldn't Drag Her Away: Ann Oren's Equine-Inspired Fairytale Piaffe

PIAFFE 
(Ann Oren, Germany, 2022, 86 minutes) 

Berlin visual artist and filmmaker Ann Oren's erotic fairytale of sexual awakening is an appealingly odd film based around an audacious premise.

Eva (Mexican actress Simone Bucio, who has the serene face of Elina Löwensohn and the graceful, svelte form of Charlotte Gainbourg) works as a sound designer, somewhat akin to Toby Jones in Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio, except she's really just a fill-in for the non-binary Zara (German-Columbian actor and filmmaker Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau). 

After her volatile sibling ends up in a mental institute for an indeterminate period of time, Eva takes it upon herself to complete their assignment, a Foley track for a commercial touting the mood stabilizer Equili, which features an actress in a stable, caring for and trotting on a horse (Jones's Berberian character also spends time working on a project, The Equestrian Vortex, with a horse-centric name). Using wooden boxes filled with hay, sand, and other substances, Eva turns to shoes as a percussive device and bites on a metal chain to duplicate the sound of a bit. 

When she brings the recording to the director (Bjørn Melhus), resplendent in crushed-velvet spandex and Moe Howard hair, he lays into her, dismissing it as the work of a machine; there's no life to it. Though he looks like a cartoon--a refugee from one of Mike Myers' "Sprockets" skits for Saturday Night Live--she takes him literally when he suggests that she get out and do some living. He doubts she even knows anything about animals, so she communes with the horses at a local stable, thus opening her up to a whole new world. 

Now, when she revisits the Foley track, she does so with greater understanding, essentially becoming the horse. This sound designer version of method acting leaves her feeling literally itchy as reality bleeds into fantasy, because the sensation signifies a new growth at the base of her spine. Unusually, it has her feeling more intrigued than perturbed. 

Though she eventually visits a specialist who takes a series of X-rays, she doesn't stick around for a diagnosis or treatment plan. The lack of surprise on the doctor's face when she sees the fleshy growth jutting from her patient's posterior says a lot about this film's cool tone, despite Carlos Vasquez's warmly-lit, soft-edged, 16mm cinematography. 

Piaffe--the word indicates a kind of dressage--isn't (body) horror, like either version of The Fly, but nor is it worlds away, because the transformation begins with a shift in Eva's personality before extending to her anatomy, exemplified by a disco sequence in which the normally soft-spoken woman has to yell and pound her fist to be heard, leading to a surprisingly sensual outcome. 

In Stephen Frears' The Queen, the director portrays the royal leader as a woman who grew up isolated from quotidian life, making normal human interactions especially challenging. There's a remarkable sequence outside Balmoral in which Helen Mirren's QE2 locks eyes with a magnificent stag, and it's as if she's met the one creature in the world with whom she truly feels a connection, no matter how fleeting. In his Oscar-nominated screenplay, Peter Morgan wisely avoids any analysis or explanation.

That, to some extent, is what the horse in the Equili commercial becomes for Eva. After all, a horse can't throw things at her, which Zara does when they finally consent to see her. Zara, who also has long dark hair, is as much a representation of Eva's bolder, shadow self as a blood relation.

In addition to the sound effects work, she has a day job overseeing a Quay Brothers-like Fotoplastikon made from wooden panels and clattering metal wheels that revolve and whir. The arcane device allows scientists like Dr. Novak (Dark's Sebastian Rudolph), an intense-looking, middle-aged botanist, to watch stop-motion footage of ferns growing and rustling through one of several brass viewfinders. He does so furtively, as if her were watching a sex loop. 

In her new, more extroverted incarnation, Eva pays a visit to Dr. Novak's Botanical Institute, but he expresses little interest until she turns around, and he notices the full-sized tail she has made no effort to disguise. He's as blasé as the doctor, but also possibly turned on, and a unique sexual relationship ensues in which he handles her body the way he does his hermaphroditic ferns. It's sadomasochistic, and that's what she wants. 

It's also less heteronormative than it may at first appear, since the growth beneath Eva's tail is very, very phallic. As Oren told Movieweb, "I mean, she's also inter-species in the end; she's intersex and inter-species." 

Reality and fantasy continue to entwine as overhead lights flicker on and off and äbvsd's thumping techno music from the disco takes over the soundtrack even when Eva is just walking around town or riding the bus. She also imagines that Zara is spying on her assignations with the doctor--and maybe they are.

Piaffe, which expands on Oren's 2020 short Passage, isn't half as dark as Lynn Stopkewich's Kissed or Jane Campion's In the Cut, but it also centers a woman who can't feel pleasure--she can't even feel alive--without stepping way outside the bounds of convention. In those other films, it's through illicit and/or dangerous predilections like sex with the recently demised or potentially psychopathic, though Eva, like Molly Parker's funeral worker, prefers physical sensations to emotional entanglements.

Though the actors play it straight, and though there's nothing overtly humorous about the tone of the film, Oren and Brazilian co-writer Thais Guisasola embrace the ridiculousness built into the premise--though they avoid the groan-worthy horse puns dominating a few too many reviews.

Beyond the imperious commercial director and his chartreuse getup, another humorous sequence has Eva nailing metal plates to the soles of her shoes, so that they click when she walks, putting a trot-like spring in her step. It's funny, but also kind of sweet. 

As in Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio and Flux Gourmet, Oren uses sound as precisely as her central character. The score, primarily cello scrapings from Daniela Lunelli, aka Munsha, plays a secondary role to the sounds of brushing, clomping, and the squeaking of leather. Adding to the aesthetic appeal, Carlos Vasquez's tactile, yet dreamy cinematography brings Polish filmmakers Andrej Żuławski and Krzysztof Kieślowski to mind--specifically Possession and the Three Colors trilogy--in the way he uses intense, saturated reds (blood, roses, lipstick) and blues (disco lights, dresses). The colors become more vibrant in concert with the character. 

Like Matthew Barney before her, Oren comes from the art world, and in interviews, she makes it clear that she has no intention of trading art for filmmaking, but rather continuing to work in both forms—and combining the two when possible. She's currently planning a third film, a short in the Passage/Piaffe series, and also preparing a second narrative feature. 

As for Simone Bucio, I had no idea she wasn't German until after I watched the film. I never would've guessed. Granted, there's relatively little dialogue, but she blends in with the German cast. Like the actresses I mentioned at the outset, Elina Löwensohn and Charlotte Gainsbourg, she appears to share the same willingness to do whatever an adventurous, if supportive filmmaker asks of her. In the 2016 Mexican film Untamed, for instance, which takes direct inspiration from Possession--I'm sensing a pattern here--she plays a character who makes love with a sort of outer space squid.

Odd as it may be, the visually and sonically ravishing Piaffe--give or take the thumping techno--is the opposite of tragic or scary. Whether together or separately: I can't wait to see what Ann Oren and Simone Bucio do next. 


Piaffe opens Sept 22 at The Grand Illusion. Images from Indiewire (Simone Bucio), IMDb via the 2022 Locarno Film Festival, Verleih (Bucio and Bjørn Melhus), Screen Slate (Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paeta), critic.de (Bucio and Sebastian Rudolph), and Senses of Cinema (Bucio).

Monday, September 11, 2023

Revisiting Ridley Scott's Dark Fantasy Legend

LEGEND
(Ridley Scott, 1985, US/UK, 113 minutes)

If Universal had released Legend a year after Tony Scott's flyboy adventure Top Gun, 1986's box office champ, they just might have had a hit on their hands. Instead, this dark fairytale from Tony's older brother, Ridley, premiered in the UK the previous year. 

Though 1983's Risky Business had secured Tom Cruise's leading man status, superstardom was yet to arrive. Instead, much like Sir Ridley's third feature, Blade Runner, Legend proved a box office disappointment. While the former would become a certified sci-fi classic, the latter has become an enduring cult favorite, now elaborately deconstructed by Arrow in a special edition set. One disc features the 89-minute US theatrical cut with Tangerine Dream score and the other features the superior 113-minute director's cut with Jerry Goldsmith score (this set omits Disney's 94-minute European cut). 

In both, 17-year-old Mia Sara, who appeared in Ferris Bueller's Day Off around the same time, plays entitled royal Lili who jeopardizes the entire mortal world when she carelessly puts a beautiful white unicorn in harm's way, thereby creating an opportunity for the forces of evil, represented by a gaggle of goblins, to disempower the creature. She and Cruise's Jack, her forest friend and potential love interest, combine their talents to rescue the sole mare, lest the world be plunged into a permanent nighttime state (it's worth noting that my friend Bill used to refer to this as Cruise's "snaggletooth" era; he hadn't yet gotten his teeth fixed).

Their friends include Oona, a Tinkerbell-like sprite (Annabelle Lanyon), and Gump, a mischievous elf (David Bennent, the wide-eyed former child star of Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum). Their foes include the man-eating seahag Meg Mucklebones (Star Trek: Voyager's Robert Picardo) and above all, the demonic Darkness (Rocky Horror Picture Show's Tim Curry outfitted with lizard eyes, cloven hoofs, and ceiling-scraping horns). 

Once Darkness spies the lovely Lili, he decides to make her his bride, no matter that she once told Jack she would marry the first man to retrieve a ring she tossed in the lake. If the two primary versions of the film end happily, one is more conventionally happy than the other. Though Sara, in her feature-film debut, and 22-year-old Cruise make for appealing leads, Curry's Darkness steals the show, thanks largely to painstaking makeup effects by The Thing's Rob Bottin that took up to five hours to apply. 

The entire Arthur Rackham-inspired forest, constructed on Pinewood Studios' 007 Stage, also impresses with oversized trees, an authentic waterfall, and abundant flora and fauna. In his detailed commentary track on the director's cut, Scott notes that computer-generated imagery, which he would come to embrace in the ensuing years, can be more efficient, but isn't really cheaper than practical effects.

Other extras include an informative commentary track on the theatrical cut from Paul M. Sammon (Ridley Scott: The Making of His Movies), new and archival featurettes, storyboards, two drafts of Angel Heart screenwriter William Hjortsberg's script, and a 2003 documentary on the director. 

Though Legend may never achieve full-on classic motion picture status, the more fleshed-out director's cut proves that Ridley Scott's lovingly-crafted fairytale always deserved better than it got from both film critics and paying audiences alike. 

***** ***** ***** ***** *****

The Legend special edition set is available on Blu-ray from Arrow Video. Images from SyFy/Universal Pictures (Mia Sara as Black Lili), Yahoo! Life (Sara and unicorn), and the IMDb (Tim Curry as Darkness and the 1986 international one-sheet).