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Bertrand Mandico
French auteur with a talent for converting his free-flowing fever dreams into cinema, most of them involving transformation in one form or another. A lot of it involves genders, gender fluidity and biological transformation, but also free-flowing convergence between nature, plants and creatures, morphing age, or flesh, props and people into each other, etc. His sets are artificial but mind-bogglingly detailed and constantly pulsating and alive in endlessly inventive and bizarre ways. He is anti-structure, anti-art-house in the sense of format and morality, preferring free-flowing desires, mood and whim over imposing any kind of plan or framework on the audience. Strongly influenced by Borowczyk's surreal and uninhibited erotic cinema, where erotic fantasy take over the camera. Of course, this will only appeal to some that don't require some kind of structure to chew on, and an audience that can tune into his highly eccentric inner world that he splatters all over celluloid's face for us to see. Mostly releases shorts that are better suited to his self-indulgent exercises and experiments, but also mid-length films and the occasional full-length movie. Mandico's follow-up to Wild Boys thankfully drops the gender obsession for the most part, but keeps the plotless, whimsical, acid-induced visual imagery with a vengeance. This takes place in a very strange planet where only women can survive, the men being hindered by their body hairs. The women, mostly lesbian, but some sporting a previously unknown lust for men, live off the strange planet that provides a constant stream of bizarre flora and creatures, many of them indescribable, including live caterpillars that serve as cigarettes, and humanoid masses of branches, ferns and flesh but missing a face. Roxy is a childlike omnisexual empath who releases a killer from the sand, a killer who has a third-eye on her genitalia and who is called Kate Bush (yes you are reading this right). Her mother, the hairdresser, is sent on a mission to kill this psychopath using guns named after brand accessories, while her daughter is haunted by the dead as well as horny visions of Kate Bush. The movie is an acid, sci-fi, strangely sensual, whimsical adventure as they go on their quest and encounter one strange thing or person after another, and do things that would be difficult to describe. There's not much of a plot though, nor characters that make much sense, but this movie definitely has its own way of doing and presenting things. Best viewed while under the influence. Half-length surreal 'biopic' on Walerian Borowczyk that portrays (briefly) his life and attitude through artistic visual surrealism, employing fantasies and humor that are somehow both coarsely ribald and tasteful, much like Borowczyk's work. His life is portrayed via short chapters conforming to the letters of the alphabet. For example, Walerian is born from a father who saw up his mother's skirt by chance and seduced her with his 'earthy charms', all of this displayed using a mix of ribald erotica and literal symbolism. Walerian himself lives from inside a box (a camera box), even when he comes out of his mother, seeing the world through a hole for the lens. Cameras are a mix of flesh, lenses and mechanics in Cronenbergian style, and yes, naked women lust for horses and are overcome by the bestial nature in man. Quite well done, and doesn't wear out its welcome. Only a 30-minute film, but what a short! Mandico shows his horny Borowczyk roots here, combined with bits of fleshy Cronenberg and Zulawski's Possession, and a dreamy Cocteau-esque surrealism. Two actresses in a forest discover a hairy lump of flesh with a phallus attached, which triggers many hormonal reactions in them, as well as a violent rivalry. They grow attached and lustful towards the pulsating flesh, and commit violence, but what does the flesh want? The sets and costumes are pure Mandico, with other-worldly plants and flowers fusing with the biological, and living human naked statues. The play they are rehearsing involves an Oedipus with huge nipples chanting pretentious nonsense while being splattered with goo and talking to his mother's vagina. Thankfully, this short film is funnier than this play, although, typically with Mandico, the play becomes an integral surreal part of the story for a bizarre, out-there ending. Another half-hour short by Mandico, longer than his usual shorts, and too bizarrely entertaining to pass up. Somehow I recognized this one as a comedy, though Mandico's sense of humor is extremely out-there. A cult is performing a ritual on a woman that makes her 'incarnate' by letting her internal organ out of her body to float, expand, ascend and become. Because a smile is an aggressive act to another person, but this makes both her and her organ deliriously happy and lets people connect to her internals. Two police-men are filmed interrupting this ritual with a hairy, nasty, bloated, floating internal organ surrounded by weirdos and a nonsense-spouting cult-guru, repeatedly, each time with a different outcome, some of them violent, all of them bizarre. Sometimes these police-men have penis-clits for noses, and other times they interact with a diseased street-trash girl. Somehow, this ridiculously bizarre nonsense is entertaining. This is like a blend of Guy Maddin and Walerian Borowczyk, as directed by a transsexual desperate to blur all the lines between the genders, and unintentionally ending up emphasizing the same lines. A group of young men (acted by tomboy women), rape their flirty female literature teacher, get sent away onto a ship with a strict captain for purposes of disciplining and softening, and end up on a fantastic island of pleasures that converts men into women. There is a streaming injection of semi-surreal fantastic elements such as a nightmare hybrid creature, phallic plant fountains, penises falling off, and ethereal disembodied faces, as well as absurd not-quite-reality games and activities straight from a Maddin flick. The cinematography is very nice to look at, but the shift between B&W to color and back is a constant distraction that serves no purpose. As mentioned, descriptions for this movie all seem to be about blurring the gender borders, except it is obnoxiously obsessed with genitalia and gender stereotypes to the point of making the movie a tiresome one-note experience since there's not much story or character. Come to think of it, the actual agenda of this movie is feminist-misandrist in that it portrays women as superior and all men as being rapists or harsh people that, ideally, require training in order to be 'converted' to women. Some visual points of interest, but mostly tiresome. Another surreal mid-length film by Mandico, this one on the theme of filming, fantasy and eroticism, the connection between director and actress that emblematizes the director's desires and fantasies, thus also allowing fantasy to achieve eternal youth. The problem is, Mandico films this as a completely free fever-dream random jumble of images and ideas, with completely random bizarre and surreal sets and props repeatedly becoming the new reality, only to turn into another scene in a film yet again. The actors interact through desire, and the camera channels arousal, until it transforms into a Cronenbergian moist fleshy object. An attempt to turn the ultimately self-indulgent and horny into art with zero rules and structure. Mandico's free-form visual representation of the Conan myth and the legacy of his 'barbarity' through the ages of cruel humanity. Except this has nothing to do with the tales of 'Conan the Barbarian' and looks more like 'The Barbarity of Conan' as envisaged by a lesbian fashion designer on acid. In this surreal version, Conann is a woman shaped into her barbaric self by a dog-faced immortal creature called Rainer who constantly takes pictures of Conann (probably to represent the author and popularizer of Conan). She constantly reinvents herself through the ages by literally killing her younger selves. It starts in medieval times of gory barbarity as she feeds on revenge on Sonja, becoming enamored of her brutal thoughts of revenge until Sonja becomes her lover (huh?). Then she becomes a lesbian stunt-woman in modern times, then a Nazi inflicting her brutal violence on Europe, then a cruel billionaire living off her image, culminating in an extended, grotesque and gory scene of cannibalism. As usual with Mandico, sets and costumes are completely random and indescribable for a free-form visual experience. Only this was an even more tiresome and self-indulgent experience than the other films, without the magic alien worlds. And that's without mentioning the issues with all this trendy fantasy gender nonsense. Half-length 'film' by Mandico that feels like a collection of 3-4 incoherent fragments. There's an alien psychedelic world and a girl being chased by odd people in outlandish costumes who then perform random make-overs and gender changes on her. This feels like a discarded fragment from After Blue. Then there's some random imagery of a motorcycle assassin and a stabbed model, overlooked by a pretentious gothic director. Then, for the majority of this 'film', there's a Planet of the Apes model photo-shoot as a monkey-human photographer takes a monkey-human model to random wild locations and gives her pretentious instructions of what to express, including a passing 'train of regrets', and sinful thoughts over a dead body in the marsh. I'd call this a joke, except it isn't cohesive or funny. Most probably just fragments of ideas the director couldn't bring himself to throw away. |
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