This week, the Screengrab is honoring "the 15 Top Bars of Cinema", which provides us with a handy occasion to remember many filmmakers' favorite literary drunk, Charles Bukowski. Aside from the best-known Bukowksi-based movie, the 1987 Barfly (which Bukowski wrote in tribute to himself), the man has been well-represented on-screen in such films as the 1981 Tales of Ordinary Madness (in which his alter ego--"Charles Serking" he's called this time--is playing by an enthusiastically rutting Ben Gazzara) and the more recent Factotum starring Matt Dillon, as well as the posthumously assembled documentary Bukowski: Born Into This, which is full of footage of the man himself, explaining the world to the camera to kill time while wondering when his good friend Peaches is going to call. Worth tracking down: J. J. Villard's 2003, award-winning animated short Son of Satan, a heart-warming tale of cruel youth based on a Bukowski story. (We're still holding out hope that we might someday get to see the 1977 Supervan, in which Bukowski is said to have a small, uncredited role as "Wet T-Short Contest Water Boy.") The real ringer in the Bukowski filmography is the 1987 Belgian feature Love Is a Dog from Hell, a sensitive three-part story about a man with a romantic spirit who longs to be in love and to be loved but whose inability to meet the real world halfway dooms him to a life of terminal loneliness. It was directed by Dominique Deruddre, who used Bukowksi's story "The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California" as the basis for a short film and then came up with the other two episodes as lead-ins to the concluding episode so that he could expand it to a feature. It's about how the adult Harry (Josse De Pauw), a ruined drunk in his early thirties, finds one night of bliss with a beautiful woman who can't reject him--a corpse (Florence Beliard) that he and a buddy swipe from the back of a hearse.
All the major Bukowski movies have been made by foreign directors--the Italian Marco Ferreri (Tales of Ordinary Madness), the Swiss-German Barbet Schroeder (Barfly), the Norwegian Bent Hamer (Factotum). Probably they see his work as giving them a chance to explore the parts of America that don't make it into Hollywood movies, and part of the fascination of those movies has been seeing where those guys have gone when they've landed in L.A. with Bukowski as a tour guide. Love Is a Dog from Hell is different in that it transposes the material to a European setting, and it feels very different. In the opening sequence, the twelve-year-old Harry (Geert Hunaerts) is starting to feel sexual urges which are all mixed up with the soaring, unattainable romantic feelings he experiences watching a movie, in which the princess in need of rescuing is played by the same blonde actress who'll later turn up as his necrophiliac soul mate. And in the middle section, with De Pauw as the adolescent Harry, a dead man walking as the high school graduation dance approaches. The dance is the high point of the movie. Harry the teenager expresses his hopeless romantic feelings by writing poetry, but his body seems to be expressing its gnarly desires by bestowing on him a case of acne that makes him look like something out of a David Cronenberg movie. In his peak of daring, Harry wraps his exploding-pizza face in toilet paper in the men's room and then successfully asks his dream girl to dance with him. It's as lucky as he'll ever get until he starts dating the newly deceased.
In the movies that others have shot on Bukowski's home turf, the directors have celebrated the wildness and low-rent hedonism that are the pay-off for his acceptance of himself as a "failure" by the standards of polite society; those directors probably see him as one of the last embodiments of the American frontier spirit. But Love Is a Dog from Hell concentrates on the reject's sorrow and rage over what he's being denied, and it has a gentle, heartbroken quality that goes with the country-village look of the settings and the soft light and the slight off-ness of the high school band's versions of American pop songs from the 1950s. It's an art movie, but of a special kind: it's one of those foreign films that, because of its subject matter, was thrust not into the art theaters but into the grindhouses. It played there under the title Crazy Love, and that's the title under which it's now available on DVD.