For the week of May 27th, extreme cinema is the name of the game. The most noteworthy title in that regard: Criterion's new edition of the great David Lynch thriller Blue Velvet. Blue Velvet represents something all too rare in Hollywood history: sometimes you can follow your passions, wild and idiosyncratic as they might be, and the audience will follow right alongside you. That's certainly what happened to director David Lynch. Lynch pivoted from the midnight-movie classic Eraserhead into mainstream acclaim with his Gothic The Elephant Man biopic; however, when his high-profile adaptation of Dune cratered, Lynch blew his shot at four-quadrant success. Other directors have been felled by less (paging Colin Trevorrow: The Book of Henry is calling), but Lynch took Dune's belly-flop as a sign to follow his muse no matter where it led him. So goes Blue Velvet, which begins with Kyle MacLachlan's innocent Jeffrey Beaumont finding a severed human ear and only gets stranger from there. Lynch shoots so much of his film like Picnic that we're not prepared for him to send his camera barreling into the ear canal. Like Jeffrey, we're not prepared for the depravity that follows, most notably an abused sexual deviant (Isabella Rossellini) and the frightening sadist (Dennis Hopper) pulling the strings for his own twisted amusement. Lynch might be finding inspiration from old Hollywood melodramas and film noirs, but the level of brutality and cruelty is bracing even today. Yet Blue Velvet remains weirdly accessible. Lynch devises a not-unengaging central mystery, and he's constantly tossing in oddball humor to leaven the chaos. And the move won him his career back and helped secure his title as Hollywood's most popular avant-garde auteur. Movies like Blue Velvet are to be treasured.
Svet Atanasov wrote that "this film has it all - style, substance, and an incredible cast that delivers big. It is dark and unsettling, but at the same time deliciously perverse and occasionally even funny. Lynch hits like a champion should, with impressive precision and where it matters the most. The main characters are impossible to forget. All of them, without exception, have unique qualities that impress. Some of their relationships are strange, but not unbelievable, certainly not for a Lynch film. More importantly, they are complete, and in the grand scheme of things perhaps even logical. Frederick Elmes' lensing is outstanding. Some of the long shots are amongst the most original seen in contemporary American films. There is also a beautiful music score by the great Angelo Badalamenti."
But the award for most physically intense movie of the week goes to Gaspar Noé's musical-horror Climax. I cannot, in good conscience, offer this film a traditional recommendation; in telling the story of a French dance troupe who get unwittingly dosed with LSD and spend the night on a Very Bad Trip, Noé subjects the viewer to a sensory nightmare almost as traumatic as what his characters experience. He shoots the film in impossibly long takes that allow us no escape from the depravity on screen: people dance and screw and fight and maim and torture and burn one another inches from Benoît Debie's prowling, leering camera. Noé bathes the proceedings in flashing colors and a relentless, nonstop pop soundtrack, almost like he's trying to give viewers a stroke (a suspicion confirmed by the Cannes reception of his most recent film, Lux Æterna). And while I didn't time it, most of the film's last twenty minutes unfold in one upside-down camera-take bathed in hellfire-red light – with Noé, you can never be sure if he's trying to duck an NC-17 rating (I'm amazed this movie received an R as is) or inspire his audience to nausea. I do not say this lightly: between the throbbing bass and the visceral insanity, this movie gave me a panic attack (it did not help that the subway ran constantly under my theater at the Angelika Film Center). Here's the thing, though. Climax may have broke me, but I guarantee that was Noé's intention. Whether he's presenting 3D porn at the Cannes Film Festival or trying to recreate what we experience at the exact moment our soul leaves our body, Noé is less a filmmaker than a cinematically gifted provocateur (you might also say "troll," and you wouldn't necessarily be wrong), and he's looking to push his audiences well past where they'd normally go alone. In that regard, Climax is a rousing success.
As for Jonas Åkerlund's gruesome docudrama Lords of Chaos, I won't mince words: this film is the most repellent cinematic experience I've had in three decades of movie-going. In dramatizing the real-life story behind True Norwegian Black Death Metal band Mayhem, Åkerlund thrusts us into a world of profoundly unpleasant squalor and misery. I'm willing to give Åkerlund and his co-screenwriter Dennis Magnusson the benefit of the doubt, that when the Mayhem band members weren't committing major/minor acts of vandalism, killing cats/other small animals and smelling their rotting corpses (or making other people smell them), and getting wasted at parties and then firing off loaded shotguns, they were raging on-stage and mutilating themselves so they could spray their own blood/fluids over an adoring crowd. It's just that I keep resisting the film's attempts to draw me into such a vile world. And that's before Mayhem's lead singer (Jack Kilmer, who looks so much like his dad Val) slashes both his wrists, his throat, and then blows half his head off with a shotgun. This is less a spoiler than the film's inciting incident: after twenty minutes of narrator/protagonist Euronymous Bosch (Rory Culkin, who's fine and nothing more) putting the band together, Kilmer's Dead offs himself, and the whole tenor of the movie shifts. Plot-wise, Euronymous uses Dead's death (now that's an awkward phrase) to legitimize Mayhem's Death Metal bonafides, but more importantly, the film shifts from grodily watchable to damned unendurable. Åkerlund lingers over every millimeter of gouting blood and demolished skull; Dead's suicide is one of the three most realistic depictions of death that I've ever seen in a fiction film. The other two? A stabbing at this film's midpoint, where Mayhem drummer Faust (Valter Skarsgård, brother to Bill and Alex) butchers a gay man in Lillehammer's Olympic Park, and then the horrifying finale, wherein Mayhem's psychotic replacement singer Varg (the loathsome Emory Cohen) snaps and stabs [REDACTED] twenty-three times. In all three instances, what makes the violence so upsetting is the unholy marriage between craft and performance. On one hand, what Åkerlund has done here offends me because it doesn't come close to earning its violence. If Lords of Chaos believes in anything, it's "life sucks - get a helmet," and that's still a cop-out because the Coen Brothers have dibs on that theme until time immemorial. There are other things to dislike here. Lords of Chaos has that standard biopic problem of packing too much incident into an abbreviated runtime. So, too, do we never get a bead on anyone here other than Kilmer, Cohen, and Culkin's characters: it's a lot of pale, moody faces buried under lank black hair. Furthermore, lest we forget, Åkerlund also directed Spun, which was as off-putting in its treatment of women as this one is in its brutality. He's limited by the fact that Lords of Chaos has far fewer female characters, but oh my, does he love reducing them down to jiggling, overstimulated sex parts (poor Sky Ferreira). The film plays like a Larry Clark rip-off, one that downplays Clark's rampant hypersexualization (thankfully) while ignoring/missing Clark's hypercritical eye towards misbehavior committed on the fringes. Truly, deeply irresponsible.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "Scandinavian countries often seem like refuges of peace and stability to those of us who live in more fractious, contentious nations. There may be some lingering, simmering signs of dysfunction, though, in these seemingly serene regions...As such, the disturbing 'based on a real story' Lords of Chaos may not be that surprising, even if its depiction of a bunch of so-called 'Black Metal' heads getting into some pretty twisted behaviors may strike some as at least a little odd when thinking about Norway, the country where these events more or less transpired as they are depicted in the film...[It] will be a visceral viewing experience for any music fan who knows of 'black metal,' or who is at least perhaps a fan of more 'Western' idioms like Goth. But the film doesn't shirk from some really unsettling aspects here, and so this is definitely not an outing for the faint of heart or squeamish."