Taking Drugs to Make Movies to Take Drugs To: Iván Zulueta's 1979 Psychodrama Arrebato

ARREBATO / Rapture

 

 

 

(Iván Zulueta, 1979, Spain, 115 mins)

"Fuck the movies."

José (Eusebio Poncela)

 

On the surface, 1979's Arrebato ("Rapture") is a horror movie about the horror of becoming overly invested in the making of horror movies. 

 

In that sense, it recalls Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio (2012) and Prano Bailey-Bond's Censor (2021), even as it pre-dates both of those films, one about a British sound mixer unraveling while working on a giallo in Italy and the other about a censor unraveling while working as a government-sponsored editor during Britain's "video nasty" era.

 

On a deeper level, it's a film about drug addiction in which film is as much of a drug as the drugs consumed while making films, an idea the Spacemen 3 once explored as Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To. As the addictions feed off each other, art and life become indivisible.   

As it begins, a slinky vampire with long, dark hair strolls out of her glass-topped coffin to skulk about before José (Dwight Yoakam doppelgänger Eusebio Poncela, The Cannibal Man), a Madrid horror director and his editor stop what they're doing to bicker. She isn't real, just a character in José's film, but he doesn't like the way she appears to be looking at the camera. "Meaningless cinema," he sniffs before leaving for the day. 

 

He's in a shitty mood when he gets home to find that Pedro (Will More, Pedro Almodóvar's Dark Habits), a figure from his past, has sent a reel of Super-8 film, a cassette, and a key. On the off-chance you've forgotten you're watching a film from 1979, these items will surely remind you. 

 

José's night proceeds to get worse as his girlfriend, Ana (Cecilia Roth, looking like Dressed to Kill-era Nancy Allen), won't wake up, the bathroom appliances turn against him, and Pedro, a floppy-haired figure in a Withnail and I-like overcoat, materializes in front of him before disappearing again. What's an angry, jittery guy to do but to shoot some smack? 

 

In a flashback, José drives to Segovia with his ex-girlfriend Marta (Marta Fernández Muro, Almodóvar's Law of Desire) to visit her toothy aunt, Carmen (Carmen Giralt). This is where he first meets her cousin, Pedro, who is obsessed with King Solomon's Mines--not the 1950 movie so much as the illustrated comic featuring stars Deborah Kerr and Stewart Granger. Once Carmen has gone to bed, José does some blow with Marta and Pedro. 

 

Though José is the central character, Pedro narrates the film by way of the cassette in a hoarse, whispery voice that plays like a manifestation of José's subconscious. Back in the present, José introduces Ana to smack. She's concerned she might become addicted, but he insists that it's all about moderation--proof that he has no idea how addiction works. 

 

Here and elsewhere, Iván Zulueta, a poster designer-turned filmmaker, leaves nothing to the imagination, though the full-frontal nudity and polymorphous sexuality never feels unnecessary or exploitative, not least because his sole directorial credit is largely autobiographical. Fascist dictator Franco had left office just four years prior, and Zulueta and his friend and supporter, Pedro Almodóvar, would lead the charge, by way of La Movida Madrileña, to expand the possibilities of Spanish film. 

 

José's two worlds collide when he brings Ana to meet Pedro. Both want access to Pedro's body, drugs, and film project, leading to a tense atmosphere. If Ana is relatively mature, Pedro is a child with his Silly Putty, Betty Boop doll, and plastic container of Slime (I had the same stuff in junior high--it was nasty). José straddles the line between the two.  

Pedro proceeds to project home movies on his bedroom wall consisting of grainy images of Marta's home and its surroundings. Pretty quotidian stuff, though he finds it terribly exciting. In the present, José and Ana watch Pedro's latest film. Compared to the earlier material, it's more personal, sophisticated...and insidious.  

 

Now living in the city after Carmen sold their home, Pedro has become fixated on filmmaking as something that can bring him to rapture. The ultimate drug. He keeps a camera trained on his bed at all times to capture his drug-enhanced sleep, becoming convinced that another person or, more likely, a supernatural force has become involved with this otherwise solitary pursuit. When his friend, Gloria (Helena Fernán-Gómez, voiced by Almodóvar), turns off the camera after he nods off during a visit, he wakes up in a panic, convinced that he can't live without it.  

 

By this point, Zulueta has switched focus to Pedro who grows increasingly pale, red-eyed--vampiric. Throughout, the score ranges from ominous electronic rumblings to tinkly melodies played on (what sounds like) toy instruments, including squeaks, rattle-shakes, and baby lamb bleats. 

 

As José and Pedro continue to unravel, one by compulsively making a film and the other by compulsively watching it, the story threads ultimately entwine in gratifyingly proto-Videodromesque fashion.

 

Pedro Almodóvar, who would work with Cecilia Roth on 1999's All about My Mother (among other films), has proclaimed Arrebato his favorite horror film, but it goes further than that. In their early days, he truly believed that Zulueta, who would return to his native San Sebastián after the commercial failure of the film, was the superior filmmaker. A more unexpected fan: David Fincher, who references it in Fight Club. 

 

Beyond the fact that they worked and socialized together, I would imagine that Almodóvar's enthusiasm for Arrebato has something to do with the way José and Pedro can't live with or without film. Or drugs. Any more than they can make or consume one without the other. Like a drug, film is the lie that tells the truth, but a human body can only take so much of the pure, uncut stuff. In Zulueta's case, a suddenly stalled film career would not kill him and nor would his longtime heroin addiction (he passed away in 2009), but after giving it everything he had, he had nothing left to give. 

 

 

The new 4K edition of Arrebato will be available on VOD Dec 21, followed by a DVD and Blu-ray on Jan 25. All images courtesy Altered Innocence. 

Unraveling the Mystery of an Elusive Singer in Karen Dalton: In My Own Time

KAREN DALTON: IN MY OWN TIME 
(Robert Yapkowitz and Richard Peete, USA, 2020, 85 mins)

Karen Dalton, a singer and guitarist who would inspire Bob Dylan and Nick Cave, had the long hair and slim figure of her female contemporaries in the folk scene, except her look and sound was rougher and edgier--especially after she lost two of her bottom teeth in an altercation. As Cave notes in the film, "There’s a sort of demand placed on the listener. You have to enter her world, and it's a despairing world, a dark world."

She's also an artist who left behind few recorded artifacts, which has contributed to her mystique. 

In their documentary, Robert Yapkowitz and Richard Peete explain how that sound developed through interviews with her daughter, her friends, and her collaborators. Julia Holter provides the score and Missouri-born alt-folk artist Angel Olsen reads excerpts from her journals, lyrics, and poems. Interestingly, Olsen's plainspoken alto recalls Chloe Sevigny's work on the Candy Darling documentary Beautiful Darling, another film about a performer who made a mark in NYC before fading from view. 

Abbe Baird, Karen's daughter with her first husband, Don Dalton, remembers that the housewife thing didn't suit her mother in the slightest. She tried twice with two different husbands while still in her teens, and ultimately rejected the whole deal, putting her at odds with the average young Oklahoma mother in the early-1960s. 

Though she had grown up in a musical family, Karen hadn't grown up among professional musicians, but that's the life she sought for herself, even if it meant leaving two children behind and moving to New York (the film only mentions that she left Abbe, but she left her son, Lee, too). As collaborator and Holy Modal Rounder Peter Stampfel puts it, Karen wasn't simply someone who grew up with folk music, "She were a folk."

It may seem selfish, except Karen never stopped thinking about her daughter, and so she found a way to involve Abbe in her life. It's the son she appears to have forgotten about, at least in the course of this narrative, though other sources note that she would see him again.   

Nonetheless, it was a hardscrabble life for mother and child, an echo of the lives lived by her great grandparents who relocated from Mississippi to Oklahoma during the Great Depression. In New York, Karen found friends and admirers, but grew bitter that original songwriters, like Dylan, were getting all the attention, while her interpretations of preexisting material, fine as they were, weren't making the same kind of impact. 

Further, like the reclusive Nick Drake in England, she didn't enjoy performing live at a time when artists needed to play out as often as possible in order to master their craft, reach new listeners, and attract industry attention (as with Drake, she was both a skilled finger-picking guitarist and an expressive vocalist). Her frustrations serve as a reminder that the road to success, both then and now, has always involved some degree of presentation and promotion. Dalton, on the other hand, just wanted to make music. 

Fortunately, she knew better than to keep spinning her wheels in the city, so she moved to the country, and started a new life with a new partner. In Colorado, she found greater satisfaction playing at house parties than music venues. It's no way to make a living, and so she and Richard struggled financially. It's also strongly suggested that a certain well known singer-songwriter introduced her to and/or encouraged her use of hard drugs, the equivalent of a match to a powder keg filled with anger, bitterness, and resentment. 

The story doesn't end there. There were more ups and downs to come. As Peter Walker, a friend and composer, describes Karen's New York sojourns, "She seemed there, but not there--separated from all these people trying to be stars." Every time she came close to making a living at this thing she loved more than life, some kind of setback would erode her progress. 

By the end of her time on Earth, however, she had still managed to record two full albums. Though the filmmakers don't mention it, the resurgence of interest in her work didn't merely develop organically with time, but largely as a result of reissued and repackaged versions of her work by Koch, Megaphone, Delmore Recording Society, and especially Light in the Attic, which released three albums with abundant extras, starting in 2006.

Yapkowitz and Peete don't completely solve the mystery of Karen Dalton, and there's no reason they could or should. She isn't here to tell her story, and even if she were, she might not want to, but she did leave journals behind, allowing the filmmakers to include her voice as part of the narrative. Though friends suggest that depression may have contributed to her dark moods, nobody knows for sure, and the filmmakers wisely avoid any armchair psychoanalyzing.   

As much as they excluded details that might have provided for a fuller, if more complicated portrait, at the very least they've helped to set the record straight regarding her death, which has been misinterpreted elsewhere by those, like country singer Lacy J. Dalton--she liked Karen's surname so much that she took it for her own--who speculated as to what happened, without knowing the full details. I found at least one article that framed Lacy's speculation as fact. 

In the end, the truth about Karen's life is no prettier than the myths and rumors, but she deserves to be remembered for the person she was rather than the person people thought she was--or wanted her to be. 

 

Karen Dalton: In My Own Time plays Northwest Film Forum Nov 10-14.  

Images: Dalton portrait from the cover of Recording Is the Trip: The Karen Dalton Archives on Megaphone via Light in the Attic, Dalton with Dylan and Fred Neil from Fred W. McDarrah/Greenwich Entertainment, Dalton looking back from Alamy/The Economist, and Dalton in daguerreotype mode from the cover of Green Rocky Road on Gaslight Records.   

Beth B Documents a Singular Performer in Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over

LYDIA LUNCH: THE WAR IS NEVER OVER 

(Beth B, USA, 2019, 77 minutes) 

New York filmmaker Beth B has been documenting, fictionalizing, and re-contextualizing underground culture since the late-1970s, perfectly positioning her to take on a profile of no wave performer and spoken word artist Lydia Lunch. 

For the most part, Beth cedes the stage to Lunch, whose interview forms the spine of the film. If her stories can be unsettling, she has a compelling way of telling them. It isn't just her nicotine-burnished voice or her bluntly poetic words, but the wry humor that underpins most everything she says. As with her lyrics and poetry, she sounds like someone who emerged from the womb knowing the score. 

Lunch explains that she grew up in Rochester, NY during an era of protest, and took inspiration from those who stood up for their beliefs. It led her to trade the constraints of suburbia for the no-holds-barred freedoms of pre-gentrification NYC. Performances by Suicide and Mars inspired her to start her own band, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, through which she channeled her rage at patriarchy, authority, and bourgeois complacency. 

The group secured their reputation through an appearance on 1978's Eno-compiled No New York alongside other heavy hitters, like DNA and the Contortions. While some colleagues downplayed their image with nondescript outfits, Lunch played up her crimson-lipped, Bettie Page-meets-Anna Karina good looks. Other groups, releases, video projects, and musical collaborations followed with Nick Cave, Rowland S. Howard, and Jim "Foetus" Thirlwell. Though not mentioned in the film, she would also collaborate with Einstürzende Neubauten, Swans, and Sonic Youth on 1985's immortal "Death Valley '69." 

Alongside her music career, Beth covers Lunch's years as a Richard Kern collaborator. Though she helped to shape the material, Kern expresses disappointment that Village Voice critic J. Hoberman found their sexually-explicit 1985 film The Right Side of My Brain "misogynist." If anyone was exploiting Lunch, both participants agree, it was Lunch herself. She and Kern also worked with Beth B; Kern appears in 1991's American Nightmare and Lunch appears in 1996's Visiting Desire. (I've reviewed two other documentaries by the filmmaker, but haven't seen any of her short films.) 

As the documentary unfurls, it becomes clear that there isn't much difference between Lunch in person and Lunch on stage. 

Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and L7's Donita Sparks reminisce about the wilder moments they spent with her, though band mate and future Bad Seed Jim Sclavunos's story goes furthest in ways I won't spoil here. Other speakers include the Geraldine Fibbers' Carla Bozulich, the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black's Kembra Pfahler, performance artist Ron Athey, and Darkside's Nicolas Jaar, an ardent fan who would become a friend.  

If some of her peers have mellowed out--or died in the case of Howard--Lunch isn't likely to follow suit any time soon. As Nick Soulsby puts it in the film's companion book, "A devotion to nomadism, physical and intellectual, seem to have made her immune to the drag factors that tell humans to buy a couch, sit down, shut up, and repeat themselves ad infinitum." 

Forty years after she began, she's been performing with her band Retrovirus featuring guitarist Weasel Walter, bass player Tim Dahl, and former Sonic Youth and Pussy Galore drummer Bob Bert, a friend for 36 years. 

I doubt Beth B will mellow out any time soon either, though I wish she had explored Lunch's entrepreneurial side as the founder of her own recording and publishing company. It may represent the less sexy part of her story, but when it comes to sticking it to the man--Lunch's modus operandi--acting as her own boss was one of the most punk things she ever did.

Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over is available via Kino Marquee and the usual digital operators (Google Play, YouTube, Vudu). Nick Soulsby's book is out via Jawbone Press. Images: portrait from Kino Lorber, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks from Discogs, and Lunch-as-seen-by-Kern from Subbacultcha.

That Summer Feeling's Gonna Haunt You the Rest of Your Life in Leos Carax's Annette

ANNETTE 

(Leos Carax, 2021, France, rated R, 140 mins) 

There's absolutely no one like French filmmaker Leos Carax (not his real name), and if he didn't exist, we would have had to invent him. His singular vision is a bracing tonic in a play-it-safe movie world. It means that he's unafraid to plunge full-bore into ridiculousness, and yet his films never feel like the work of a showoff or a scatterbrain. They feel like the work of Leos Carax. 

Annette complicates that pattern by bringing collaboration into play. For his first English-language feature and full-fledged musical--music has always loomed large in his work--Carax teamed up with avant-pop duo Sparks, who cowrote both music and script. It's the Los Angeles duo's second collaborative effort of the year after Edgar Wright's The Sparks Brothers, which is clearly the work of three people, and I mean that in the best of ways, since I never sensed Wright imposing his will on Ron and Russell Mael. He arranged the parts; they provided the raw material. It's great. 

Annette opens by breaking the fourth wall as Carax, in a control booth, directs Sparks, in a studio. They launch into "So May We Start?," and then they walk out of the studio, still singing, to encounter stars Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. The band, stars, and backup singers stroll out of the building and down the street, running into costar Simon Helberg along the way. As the song ends, the story begins. The message is clear: "This is a movie. This is not real life." 

In the movie, Cotillard plays opera singer Ann Defrasnoux and Driver plays anti-comedian Henry McHenry, a disheveled, bathrobe-clad performer. She's sleek, he's not--press dub them "The Beauty and the Bastard." Beautifully-lit scenes by DP Caroline Champetier (Holy Motors) of Henry riding his motorcycle through deserted streets at night, sometimes with Ann and sometimes without, bring Carax's Mauvais Sang to mind. Guy likes his bikes.

During a gig, Henry announces his engagement to Ann. The audience lets out a collective gasp. Carax marks the chapters of their love story with excerpts from an excitable Entertainment Tonight-like show called Showbiz News. SBN breaks the news of their wedding, followed by news of Ann's pregnancy.

Duets, like "We Love Each Other So Much," illustrate their relationship, while the backup singers from the prologue often appear to add depth and grandeur. If Cotillard and Driver aren't great singers, they're good enough, much like Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge (soprano Catherine Trottmann lends Ann's opera performances verisimilitude).  

 

 

Then, Ann gives birth. The backup singers, dressed as hospital workers, sing through her labor. Though the couple reacts to Annette as if she were human, she's an animatronic puppet with jug ears and articulated limbs. This isn't played as Chucky-like horror, though it's certainly disquieting. 

In the midst of their bliss, damaging news about Henry starts to make the rounds, but Carax drops this subplot as quickly as he brings it up, only to move into even more disturbing territory as Henry makes a chilling confession on stage that turns the entire audience against him. They express their displeasure in song; he responds in kind. The confession predicts the cataclysmic events to come, though Carax never returns to the accusations against Henry, making me wonder why he brought them up in the first place (Carax suggests that Ann, while half-asleep in her limousine, dreamt up the whole thing).  

Annette, meanwhile, grows from a baby into a toddler as her parents' marriage hits the skids. When they take an ocean voyage in an attempt to reconnect, Carax plays with allusions to Pinocchio and Wuthering Heights. The whale-shaped lamp in Annette's room, for instance, may simply have been intended to lend nautical flair to her surroundings, but the combination of wooden child and whale imagery brings Disney's majestic Pinocchio to mind. Similarly, Annette is about to enter the belly of the beast. 

Bad things continue to happen. Either Henry doesn't know how to be happy, he isn't happy, or he isn't quite right in the head. All three things can be true. Since his 1984 debut, Boy Meets Girl (starring cinematic alter ego Denis Lavant), Carax's films tend to follow a similar trajectory: men and women fall in love only to find that they're bad for each other. He splits the difference between romance and nihilism. 

As she grows older, Annette takes after her mother in revealing a gift for song. Talking will come later. This brings her into contact with Ann's accompanist (Florence Foster Jenkins' Helberg) who has become a conductor. The love story then gives way to a new narrative suffused with jealousy, exploitation, and transference. Though I expected the relationship between Ann and Henry to form the heart of the film, the title explains all: the deeper story involves Henry and Annette, though the moments between the Conductor and the girl prove more affecting than those between the girl and her father for reasons that go beyond musical affinities.

As Annette's red hair grows longer, Henry's shrinks and takes on a silver cast until he ends up looking like an elongated Leos Carax. I suspect it isn't completely coincidental, since Carax had a daughter with Russian-French actress Yekaterina Golubeva (Carax's Herman Melville adaptation Pola X), who died under mysterious circumstances in 2011. An end credit confirms my theory that Sparks' screenplay holds personal resonance: "Pour Nastya," the name of their now-adult daughter. 

For all of its visual beauty and musical effervescence, Annette is one of the most downbeat musicals I've ever seen. If the conclusion lets in a little light, unlike Lars von Trier's ultra-gloomy Dancer in the Dark, it's still the story of a damaged person who can't resist dragging everyone he cares about down with him. As ever, though, Carax is no fool, and the sequence that plays over the end credits brings things back to the beginning: "This is a movie. This is not real life"--except it's hard to shake the feeling that it kinda, sorta is--or could've been if Carax didn't get his demons under control.  

Annette opens on Friday, August 6, at the Crest in Seattle and Lincoln Square Cinemas in Bellevue. It comes to Amazon Prime on August 20. Images: Henry from Artforum, Sparks from Polygon (Anna Webber/Focus Features), Ann from Amazon Studios, Caroline Champetier shooting Annette from AFC (Kris Dewitte / Facts of Emotions), and cast still from Sony Music.  

The Sugarhill Gang Wants Their Name Back in Roger Paradiso's 2011 Documentary

This review originally appeared on The Stranger's Line Out music blog, which disappeared several years ago. I recovered it via The Wayback Machine.

FILMThe Sugarhill Gang Wants Their Name Back

posted by KATHY FENNESSY on THU, JUL 19, 2012 at 9:40 AM

I WANT MY NAME BACK
(Roger Paradiso, US, 2011, 93 mins.)

• ROGER PARADISO
• The Gang today

I Want My Name Back isn't so much the story of the Sugarhill Gang, but the story of their lawsuit against Sugar Hill Records.

In 2005, Vanity Fair published a profile of the label (Steven Daly, "Hip-Hop Happens"). Roger Paradiso follows the template of the article for the first half of the film, but moves in a different direction once identity theft enters the picture.

He starts by introducing Wonder Mike (Michael Wright) and Master Gee (Guy O'Brien) of the Sugarhill Gang. From 1979-1984, they released three platinum albums and had a 10 million-selling hit with the 15-minute "Rapper's Delight."

Then, Paradiso profiles what he terms the Con Artists: Sylvia and Joseph "Joe" Robinson Sr., the label founders, and Morris "Moe" Levy, their silent partner. By phone, Daly discusses Robinson's R&B; career and Levy's mob connections. Subsequent signings would include Spoonie G, the Funky 4 Plus 1, and Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five (I'm not sure why he wasn't able to get Daly on camera; using a phone call in lieu of a pro recording always sounds cheap).

• SUGAR HILL RECORDS

Just as Levy would "share" songwriting credits with his artists at Roulette , he and the Robinsons—including their sons—would do the same to the Sugar Hill acts. With most of their earnings going to the label, the Gang decided to hang it up in 1984, but Joey Robinson Jr. started to pass himself off as "Master Gee" in the 1990s. Then, after Joe Sr. died and Sylvia retired, Joey Jr. and his brother, Leland, took over the label. Just when the situation couldn't get much worse, a 2002 fire consumed the Sugar Hill Studios and destroyed everything in the place.

After Sylvia copyrighted the name "the Sugarhill Gang," the members decided to reform and record an album (with Hen Dogg and DJ T. Dynasty). Big Bank Hank, unfortunately, opted to perform with Joey Jr.'s fake version of the group. Following in his mother's footsteps, Junior proceeded to trademark the names "the Sugarhill Gang," "Wonder Mike," and "Master Gee" Is this guy a piece of work or what?

With few resources at their disposal, Master Gee and Wonder Mike turned to Jay Berger from Artists Rights Enforcement Corp. to represent their interests. Once he enters the picture, this music documentary segues into a film about copyright law, which isn't a bad thing, but don't go expecting a conventional biography.

I Want My Name Back is unapologetically one-sided, and if you only want to know how the case was resolved, you can Google the results, but if you want to hear Wonder Mike and Master Gee tell their side of the story in detail, Paradiso gives them ample opportunity (other speakers include Grandmaster Caz, Melle Mell from the Furious Five, and Vinnie and Treach from Naughty by Nature). Fortunately, they come across as reliable witnesses to a despicable injustice.

I Want My Name Back plays The Northwest Film Forum (1515 12th Ave) for a second and final set of screenings: tonight, July 19, at 7 and 9 pm. I'd imagine a DVD release is imminent...unless the Robinsons have anything to say about it.

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1

karma for not giving caz a dime; i'm sure he had some jewels to say.

Posted by Larry Mizell, Jr. on July 19, 2012 at 5:45 PM · Report this

2

@1 He did! He goes into detail about the rap Big Bank Hank stole, i.e. "I'm Casanova, and the rest is fly." You're not Caz--Cassanova Fly--dude!

Posted by Kathy Fennessy  on July 20, 2012 at 7:44 AM · Report this

It Was All Whirlwind, Heat, and Flash, or the Strange Saga of Zola and Stefani

ZOLA 

(Janicza Bravo, USA, 2021, 87 mins) 

Zola, which was filmed way back in 2018, began life six years ago as a viral thread by Twitter user @_zolarmoon before David Kushner blew it up into a Rolling Stone article later that year that fills in several blanks, debunks a few claims, and confirms, above all, that A'Ziah "Zola" King is very much a real person.

Janicza Bravo's film opens much like the thread as Zola (Taylour Paige, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom), a beautiful Black woman with long, luxuriant hair, is working a shift at a Detroit Hooters when she meets Stefani (the exceptional Riley Keough), a super-smiley white woman and her Black companion. Stefani, with her high ponytail and slip dress, speaks exclusively in what used to be known as "jive"--kind of like Barbara Billingsley in Airplane, but updated for the Cardi B Era. Her favorite words: "bitch," "ho," and "sis." 

Stefani shamelessly admires Zola's attributes, and asks if she dances. Zola catches her drift, and admits that she does (she even has a stripper pole in her living room). So, Zola joins her for a stripping session that night, and a partnership begins, since she's game for adventure, and Stefani is the kind of uninhibited loose cannon who makes things happen. 

Even if you haven't read the original 148-tweet thread, it's clear that Stefani, aka Jessica Rae Swiatkowski, means trouble. Though Zola, who narrates the saga, has a boyfriend, Stefani excites her more--not sexually, but in all other respects--so when she invites her to Tampa to make some quick stripping cash, Zola takes her up on the offer. This time, Stefani shows up with Derrek (Succession's Nicholas Braun), a skinny white dude, and X (Selma's Colman Domingo), her Nigerian roommate. Zola finds the set-up curious, but that doesn't stop her from getting into X's SVU for a Migos-filled road trip. 

Once they get to town, the look on her face says it all. "This was a mistake." That look remains unchanged once she realizes they'll all be sharing the same motel room, but things work out as planned, at least for a while. Bravo pays as much attention to Zola and Stefani's bodies as any director of a stripper story would, from Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike (which featured Keough in a non-stripper role) to Lorene Scafaria's Hustlers. Terms like "male gaze" and "female gaze," though, are in the eye of the beholder. Presumably, the actresses felt more comfortable working with a woman, but they're still dancing for our pleasure as much as that of their on-screen audience. That doesn't make it porn and nor does that make it exploitative, but that doesn't automatically exclude it from those descriptions either. 

If the women don't take everything off, they don't leave much to the imagination either. Zola even makes it clear that she's fine with nudity, except the Tampa club doesn't allow it (the women wear sequined pasties instead). Just when it seems as if the exposed flesh in the film will be exclusive to women, there's an entire sequence featuring nude men. Granted, Bravo doesn't sexualize them in the same way, but it restores some balance to the scenario. 

When Stefani encourages Zola to "trap," i.e. to turn tricks, she adamantly refuses, though it appears she might not have a choice, so she finds a way to turn the situation to her advantage. If that wasn't the case, I doubt Bravo would have gravitated towards the project in the first place, because it's otherwise the tale of a white woman taking a Black woman for a ride. If Zola puts her fate in the hands of a shady crew, she's never as mean or as stupid as any of them. Once she comes up with a plan to avoid tricking, the dynamic shifts, but she's still not out of the woods. Though they didn't kidnap her, she isn't free to leave, and it will soon become more difficult. 

Zola is an attractive film that benefits from the talents of composer Mica Levi (Under the Skin), cinematographer Ari Wegner (The Girlfriend Experience, also starring Keough), and editor Joi McMillon (Moonlight) even as it takes on more weight than an 87-minute film can comfortably handle, including female friendship, sex work, and cultural appropriation. If I prefer it to Bravo's directorial debut, it's largely because she's grown more confident in her filmmaking. She also built Lemon around ex-husband Brett Gelman's boorish character, and a little went a long way. She doesn't strain so hard to be funny here, though Keough and Braun rises to the occasion as need be. 

 

 

In contrast with the tweet thread and Kushner's article, Zola Tells All: The Real Story behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted, Bravo ends things on an ambiguous note, suggesting that exploitation by the exploited will never end. In her screenplay with Slave Play's Jeremy O. Harris, she resists turning Zola into a morality play about sex trafficking, but she doesn't provide any release either. No one is punished, and no one gets away, even though Zola witnesses a suicide attempt and a murder.

In real life, she made her escape and the murderer faced consequences, though Jessica has disputed parts of her story. At the time, she told Kushner, she was just trying to provide for her son. She now has two kids, while Zola and her boyfriend have one. Zola also served as an executive producer on the film, meaning money in the bank and a shot at further lucrative opportunities. Jessica, on the other hand, doesn't appear to have benefited in any significant way. I suspect that's exactly what Zola intended.

All images courtesy A24. Zola opens on Wednesday, June 30, at AMC Pacific Place 11, Regal Meridian, and Regal Thornton Place. VOD premiere TBA.  

Silver Screen Sex God of the '70s: David Bowie in Just a Gigolo and The Man Who Fell to Earth

JUST A GIGOLO 

(David Hemmings, West Germany, 1979, Shout! Factory, 105 mins)

 

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH 

(Nicolas Roeg, UK, 1976, The Criterion Collection, 139 mins) 

After playing a genital-free alien in his feature-film debut, Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth, David Bowie decided it was time for something sexier. He was living in Berlin at the time, working on a series of groundbreaking records with Tony Visconti and Brian Eno at Hansa Studios--Low, "Heroes," Lodger--and when he wasn't writing and recording, he and his sometime-roommate Iggy Pop were reinventing themselves by trading (or at least minimizing) their insatiable hunger for oblivion with an insatiable hunger for art and culture.

In the midst of all that activity, Bowie found time to take the lead in actor David Hemmings' directorial debut, Just a Gigolo, which takes place in Berlin in the years after World War I. In it, Bowie gradually, awkwardly segues from soldier to sex worker. The movie is many things: an almost love story, a post-war tragedy, and a satire about the rise of fascism. If it's better than its dismal reputation suggests, there's one thing it's not, and that's sexy.

 

To be sure, sexy is a subjective concept, but 1970s Bowie was generally considered sexy--to men, to women, and all other sentient beings--and The Man Who Fell to Earth runs on sex. It's possible Bowie was just being literal, because his flame-haired New Mexico-by-way-of-the-UK entrepreneur, Thomas Jerome Newton, may be genital-free in his alien form, but he spends the majority of the film in his non-alien form as a genitally-intact human, and we know this, because Roeg includes male full-frontal nudity (see also Donald Sutherland in 1973's Don't Look Now).

And it isn't just Bowie! In his loose adaptation of the Walter Tevis novel, Roeg introduces Dr. Bryce (Rip Torn) as a randy professor with a yen for attractive co-eds (he eventually gives it up, lest anyone worry that Roeg presents him as some kind of heroic figure). Then there's Mary-Lou (Candy Clark, Roeg's girlfriend at the time) who takes one look at Tommy and decides, "That's for me!" 

There's plenty of nudity from Torn, Clark, and a bevy of female extras, though I'm sorry to report that Buck Henry abstains, and I'm not completely joking, because his character, Oliver Farnsworth, is gay. Several scenes feature him and his partner, Trevor, but there's no indication of a sexual relationship. Though it's possible there was no need to depict one, that was also the playbook in the 1960 and '70s: few limits when it came to female nudity, straight or otherwise (especially in the unrated European features of Jess Franco and Just Jaeckin), significant limits when it came to straight male nudity, and most every limit when it came to gay male nudity. 

 

Granted, plenty of sexy movies don't feature any nudity at all, especially those made during the Production Code-era, but the 1970s was a different time. Hemmings' decision to play things safe wasn't necessarily a bad one. He may have wanted to avoid a rating that would limit his film's exposure, except Just a Gigolo was such a bomb that even an X wouldn't have made much difference (and the dreaded X didn't stop Midnight Cowboy from topping the box office in 1969). The film, in its original 147-minute version, crashed and burned at Cannes, and that was pretty much the end of that as it didn't receive the kind of promotion befitting a major motion picture starring Bowie, Marlene Dietrich (after a 16-year break), and Kim Novak (after a 10-year break) plus direction from the star of Antonioni's Blow-Up. 

The only truly sexualized characters in the film are two women with whom Bowie's Lt. Paul Ambrosius von Przygodski has relations, Cilly (future aerobics instructor Sydne Rome, the weakest cast member), a nightclub performer who becomes a Hollywood star, in a manner recalling Dietrich (who gives her final performance as Paul's boss, the Baroness), and Novak's widow, Helga, who hires Paul when she feels the need for male companionship. Sadly, Helga comes across as more desperate and silly than anything else. Even if that was Hemmings' intention, it's hard not to feel sorry for the soulful beauty of Vertigo being reduced to a quasi-punchline. Though Novak was only 40 at the time, the film suggests there's something especially tawdry about a middle-aged woman expressing a desire for sex. 

In the end, though, Just a Gigolo revolves around Bowie, and there's a certain unformed quality to Paul, since he's simply more reactive than proactive--much like Johnny Depp's in-over-his-head accountant in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man--but it helps to explain why he doesn't come across as particularly sexy. He lacks the necessary confidence, and like Newton, but for entirely different reasons, he doesn't seem especially comfortable with his body. 

Further, he seems mystified by women, a bizarre quality in a gigolo, but it fits into the idea that sex work may represent the field that suits him best, except he's no more likely to find the perfect job any more than he's likely to find his place in Weimar-era Berlin, because he's too good to join the fascists and too weak to resist them--so the two opposing forces destroy him. As different as the two films may seem, things don't work out much better for Newton in the Roeg film. He gets out of his world alive, yet ends up utterly alone.

If one picture is held in high regard, and the other isn't, Just a Gigolo deserves a second chance to find an audience. At the very least, the costume (Mago, Ingrid Zoré) and production design (Peter Rothe) is exquisite, and at the very most, it gets a few things right that could have gone very wrong. At the outset, for instance, when Paul realizes that Eva (singer and actress Erika Pluhar), his mother's most glamorous boarder, works as a prostitute, she shrinks in his estimation. The audience already knows that he'll soon be walking in her shoes, but she's also one of the least conflicted characters in the entire film. Hemmings may judge Helga, but he doesn't judge her. Nor does he suggest that there's something especially shameful about a man who turns tricks. It's just another job. If anything, it's a step up from Paul's previous gig as a human-size beer bottle.  

The Man Who Fell to Earth may come across as the sexier film, but the sexual relationship between Newton and Mary-Lou originated with Roeg and screenwriter Paul Mayersberg and not Walter Tevis, who had depicted a platonic relationship in his 1963 novella. (In the Mayersberg interview included with The Criterion Collection edition, he reveals that he prefers later Tevis works, like The Queen's Gambit, which would become a Netflix sensation in 2020.) 

That said, Clark makes it abundantly clear, in her Criterion interview, that she hated shooting the sex scenes, of which there are many. She says Bowie did, too. Whether her relationship with Roeg made things easier or harder, I couldn't say, but it's possible Bowie welcomed the opportunity to keep his clothes on in Just a Gigolo. 

 

 

There's one exception, though, and it's a good one. When Paul and Cilly take advantage of her wealthy patron's mansion while he's away, the Prince (Curd Jürgens, Smiley's People) surprises them with an unannounced return. When he enters the room where Bowie is taking a bath, it's hard not to fear the worst for the pale, thin fellow in the tub, except the Prince doesn't find him the least bit threatening, and they end up having a friendly chat. 

In his dishy commentary track, assistant director Rory MacLean, who describes Hemmings as "a drinker and a womanizer," notes that there were several crew members jammed in to that small room, so kudos to all concerned, especially Bowie, because you'd never know it. The entire sequence also reinforces the idea that Cilly is just as much of a prostitute as Paul, since her interest in the Prince is purely mercenary.

All told, the '70s weren't exactly the busiest time for David Bowie's acting career, though The Man Who Fell to Earth has come to define it, and who can blame him when he released 11 stunning studio recordings between 1970 and 1979. And that's on top of world tours, magazine cover stories, television appearances, and all the other minutia involved in maintaining a rock star career. Of all the film projects with which he was involved at the time, the sexiest wasn't a narrative feature at all, but D.A. Pennebaker's 1973 documentary Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Ziggy may have been a character of a kind, but he was Bowie's sole creation, and the stage, in a manner of speaking, was his bedroom. 

In the ensuing decade, he would kick things up a few notches, starting the '80s off with Uli Edel's Christiane F, in which he cameos as himself, and ending with Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, in which he plays a scruffy Pontius Pilate opposite Willem Dafoe's glistening, decidedly non-virginal Jesus. Early on in that run came Bowie's most overtly sexual film, 1983's The Hunger, in which Tony Scott reinvented Jean Rollin's hazy vampire erotica for the multiplex (that's a compliment, by the way). From alien to gigolo to glorious goth fantasy, he had finally found the perfect fit for his not-quite-of-this-earth affect and Valentino-like sex appeal. In the end, though, the sexiest Bowie character was always Bowie himself.

Just a Gigolo on-set portrait by Christian Simonpietri, The Man Who Fell to Earth still from British Lion Films, and The Hunger still from Perspex.