KINGDOM

Video Replay
by Bob Angilly
A Xenophobe's guide to Foreign Films

I've always been a bit wary of foreign films. It's not that there are not a lot of excellent movies produced in non-English speaking countries. There's Godzilla, Jackie Chan, The Sons of Hercules, the French farces of Philippe De Broca, or any Brazilian film starring Sonia Braga. But these don't seem to be what foreign film buffs like to talk about.
Foreign films became popular in the fifties and sixties as an alternative to the assembly line production methods of Hollywood's big studios. Truffaut, Fellini, Bergman, and Kurosawa developed huge followings in the U.S., making low budget black and white films with grand pretensions, a mixture of great and not-so great actors, and camera work that was often crude and sometimes brilliant. These films were shown in small independent theaters like the Brattle or the now defunct Orson Wells and Central Square Cinemas, to audiences of college students, and those who never quite got over being college students.

At the same time, America had its own independent film scene, but without studio support, or even the meager budgets of its foreign counterparts, it was left with a market of drive-ins and midnight movies. By the nineties, however, the big Hollywood movie factories were no longer making films. Instead the big studios distributed films made by smaller independent film producers and directors who now had the financial backing to produce films which could compete for the "Art House" market. New American directors like David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino showed that they could create films as strange and pretentious as Trufaut and Fellini. Elsewhere a new generation of international film makers emerged who added a little intentional humor to the mix, creating films that were just as offbeat but a lot more fun.

The Kingdom (1994) is a four-part miniseries directed for Danish TV by Lars von Trier (Zentropa), and released theatrically in the U.S. It has a very large cast and an even larger plot concerning strange happenings at Denmark's largest state hospital (where it was filmed). There is a mysterious ambulance which pulls up nightly in front of the ER and then promptly vanishes, a villainous Swedish brain surgeon trying to cover up evidence of his own malpractice, and an elderly patient searching the halls and elevators for the ghost of a young girl. Another doctor secretly lives in the basement and runs a black market redirecting hospital supplies to where they are most needed. There are secret societies, and severed heads, and a pair of dishwashers who serve as a Greek chorus anticipating each turn in the plot, even though they have no contact with the rest of characters. I've seen several descriptions of this film as "ER meets Twin Peaks" but there is also the black comedy of M*A*S*H, the surrealism of Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective, the sloppy hand-held camera work of Homicide and the absurdist nightmare of Lindsay Anderson's Britannia Hospital. The film was shot in 16mm, transferred to video for editing, and finally transferred back to 35mm film which creates a brown tone grainy effect, which combined with the unsteady hand held camera work--which makes it seem at times like the film was shot on board a ship during a storm--give the film a dreamlike quality. It's a wild ride for four and a half hours, and many of the plots are left unresolved at the end of the fourth episode. New episodes are scheduled for the summer of 1997 and these will hopefully be compiled into a sequel.

Michael Verhoeven's The Nasty Girl is based on the true story of Anja Rosmus who's research for an essay (and later a book) on the history of her Bavarian hometown during the Third Reich, created an unexpected backlash of resentment from the townspeople. Verhoeven fictionalizes the story and changes the names to protect just about everybody (Anja's character is named Sonja). In many of the early scenes Sonja (Lena Stolze) appears microphones in hand to describe the location as if this were a documentary on German TV. Other scenes are shot on sound stages with the backgrounds projected behind the actors. In some scenes set in Sonja's home, her family is sitting around the coffee table talking, while the sofa, couch and coffee table seem to be on top of a truck being driven through the streets of the town. Over the course of the film Stolze matures very convincingly from an adolescent--all wide eyes and pig tails--to a mother in her late twenties. Verhoeven always keeps the tone very lighthearted, in spite of the fact that some seriously nasty stuff happens to Sonja--she's beaten up by neo-Nazis, her house is firebombed, and there is an endless stream of threatening phone calls from everybody including her Latin teacher. In the end the film is less about the struggle to get at the truth, but about the futility of trying to hide the truth from a woman with the strength of will to get to it.

Then for sheer unbridled culture shock there is nothing like Japanese cinema. I have one friend who gave me a series of films about a team of crack Japanese school girls who battle crime with a variety of lethal yo-yos. Another friend dragged me kicking and screaming to the Somerville Theater (back during its brief incarnation as an Art-House) to see Demon Pond, based on a popular play by B. K. Izumi and directed by Masahiro Shinoda. It's the story of a university student who travels to a small town in search of his professor, who left the university without word some years before. The professor is found living with his wife in a small house by a pond outside the village. He had promised a dying man that he would ring a large bell twice a day to prevent the demons from escaping from the pond and destroying the nearby village. The professor doesn't really believe in the demons, or the bell, but the problem with cynicism is that you can never rely upon it in a crunch (cause a true cynic can't really believe in cynicism either), so twice a day he's been ringing the bell, just in case. The townspeople don't believe in demons either, and there is grumbling that all this bell ringing is somehow the cause of the drought which has been plaguing the town for over a year. In the middle of all this controversy appears a pair of crustaceans with their own argument which carries over into the pond, where you meet the court of the Dragon Princess, who is trying to escape the pond to be with her boyfriend who's trapped in another pond. The Dragon Princess and the Professor's wife are played by a man, Tamasaburo Bando (one of Japan's most famous Kabuki players) and many of the scenes are staged in the Kabuki tradition, especially the scene in the pond (which resembles a Kabuki version of Pee-Wee's Playhouse) and an extremely elaborate tea ceremony (which goes on so long I was left thinking that the tea couldn't possibly still be hot.) Eventually the villagers take action, convince the professor to stop ringing the bell by threatening to tie his wife to a cow and send it careening into the pond. Cynicism loses in a spectacular demonstration of the consequences of messing with pond demons. I actually ended up going to see this film a second time, dragging some of my other friends kicking and screaming to the Somerville Theater. After all, the most fun you can have with foreign film is inflicting them on others.