Double Feature: Cache and Big Bang Love Juvenile A

We paired these two coincidentally, but the pairing really worked for me (it worked even more so for BBLJA, the far superior film).

Cache

Cache follows an upper class French couple and their son as some unnamed person sends them hours of video tape of their house and then menacing drawings of a child vomiting blood and a decapitated chicken. The movie’s main gimmick happens immediately: it’s never clear whether you watching the movie, or the taped footage the couple receives in the mail. This narrative trick has two fatal flaws:

1. This is a surprising and unsettling device, drawing attention to the voyeuristic nature of both fictional and documentary film footage, exactly once. Not repeatedly.

2. In order to achieve this ambiguity the director was forced to fill the film with endless boring street scenes.

After the first unexpected rewind, the director did nothing interesting with the device. There was no moment where this drastically affected the plot, my sense of time, or my urgent desire to see an event unfold in real time, as opposed to second hand footage. This might be a great approach to a horror film, where revealing a scene to be previously shot and in the process of replay might mean something devastating for my ability to observe something horrifying as it unfolds (or thwart my hope for a better ending). Here it’s boring. Endless hours of film of a man’s home and life are mind numbing, no matter how dysfunctional you write his family. And the unsettling sin in the man’s past that the footage finally points to? It incriminates his parents more than it does him. Who gives up an adopted child because another kid accuses him of killing a chicken? Seriously? Also, the drawings so clearly implicate Majid, why bother with the ambiguity of not confirming this? There is one excellent visual shot, in an elevator. It was worth the 2 hours. [Photo: Even the Laurent family often jumps at the chance to fast forward through this tedious documentation of their entirely uninteresting lives]

Big Bang Love Juvenile A

Another movie about movies, but this time from Miike. I don’t know how to explain this, except to say:

It's like the title: a jumble of unrelated bits that add up to something compelling. Or, it’s what you would get if Sarah Kane directed a prison sexploitation film set physically between a rocket to the moon and an ancient pyramid, the three of which exist in a remote field (of dirt? Concrete?) so far removed from the world that there appears to be no real reason to lock up the prisoners. Inside the prison life transitions inexplicably between a gritty noir detective movie, an action film, a tender coming of age romance, and a desolate Beckett play. The physical environment of the prison shifts to epitomize the genre of the moment. Butterflies fly throughout.

It’s…great? The cinematography is beautiful, the love story is touching, the noir is fun, the kung fu is exciting, the sexploitation is unsettling, and Beckett is the only thing that could possibly tie all this together. I say it’s also a movie about movies first because it’s such a motley crew of genres, settings, characters, and aesthetics, but mostly because structurally it’s all about revealing narrative through repetition and slight revision. I think it’s an excellent non-musical example of a fugue. Miike filmed maybe 35 minutes worth of plot, but replays it from various perspectives and angles until the viewer finally has the whole story. [photo: Don't be fooled by the existential despair evoked in the theatrical space. 20 police ninjas are about to jump that guy.]