LOCAL HERO (1983)
Whither Bill Forsyth? Withering, apparently: after a charming run of movies in the 1980s (including Gregory’s Girl, Comfort and Joy and Housekeeping), the Scottish director flamed out with 1993’s Being Human (a terrible film which, unsurprisingly, stars Robin Williams), disappearing for good after 1999’s Gregory’s Two Girls (which may or may not be terrible, since I only just learned of its existence through the Internet Movie Database). But Forsyth can make sequels and terrible Robin Williams movies from now until doomsday and he’ll still be one of my favorite directors of all time, if only for bringing Local Hero into existence. A simple but compelling vision of utopia, the film takes place in a gorgeous Scottish fishing village where everyone is welcome and accepted at the local ceilidh, from punk rockers and homeless beachcombers to American businessmen, Russian sailors, African preachers and pretty big city scientists who just might turn out to be mermaids. Movies (especially the Hollywood variety) are usually too impatient, loud and cynical to capture the best parts of actually being human – the beauty of a fantastic night sky, the electric giddiness of a new flirtation, the relaxed camaraderie of smart, decent people – but Forsyth seduces us with the salty sweetness of his celluloid world the way the fictional village of Ferness eventually seduces the film’s shaggy dog protagonist, Mac (played with deadpan cable-knit sweater warmth by the ever-reliable Peter Riegert), an oil company executive tasked with paving paradise to put up a shiny new oil refinery...and, like most real-life utopias, the sense of bittersweet impermanence only heightens the appeal of the place.
SOLARIS (1972)
The beginning of Tarkovsky's Solaris takes place in a retro-future world so sterile and strange that it was filmed in Tokyo. There's a lovely long tracking shot as our hero, Kelvin, drives through the city. I long to sync it with the retro-future sounds of the krautrock band Neu!, which similarly used repetition, driving drums and avant-noise to achieve transcendence. Kelvin visits his parents' house, too, and it is a little Eden of a cottage with a nearby pond. Kelvin soon leaves the cold, clean Earth for the broken-down spaceship circling the planet Solaris, which is potentially sentient. It's not long before his ex-wife, a suicide, shows up in the flesh, so to speak. The end of the film finds Kelvin in his little Eden again, although everything is different now. It's a mirror of Kelvin's perfect little Eden, but the reflection cannot live up to the reality. And the reality is lost to memory, anyway. The above clip is from the end of the movie, so be forewarned. (Soderbergh's remake is interesting, but lacks the punch of Tarkovsky's film.)
BRAZIL (1985)
Terry Gilliam, according to legend, had always wanted to do a movie of George Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four. But Michael Radford beat him to it, so he had to invent his own version. It’s probably a good thing he did – Gilliam, whatever his strengths as a director (and they are many, as many as his weaknesses), is probably too weird to make an adaptation of the rise and fall of Winston Smith that made any kind of sense. But as great as Radford’s movie was, Brazil is greater, not in spite of, but because of the fact that it’s so relentlessly strange. The ever-watching eyes of the state peer endlessly at its own civil servants, with results that are as hilarious as they are tragic. Technology is meant to be miraculous but is instead disastrous, and the most subversive thing someone can do is to fix things. Government torturers dress in absurd masks and order the deaths of the wrong people through bureaucratic cock-ups. The heads of state and upper-level party functionaries, instead of being grim and faceless tyrants, are self-deluding clowns who make themselves unrecognizable with plastic surgery or spout endless, hollow sports metaphors. Orwell had seen life’s horrors in his time, and reflected them in his novel; but Terry Gilliam chose to focus on life’s absurdities, and his nightmare vision of the future was one of a man who couldn’t believe that human beings, asinine and incompetent as they were, could even get a dystopia working properly.
PUNISHMENT PARK (1971)
When it was released (to complete indifference from the public and general hostility from the handful of critics who saw it), Peter Watkins’ unnerving pseudo-documentary seemed, to some, unnervingly real. Its nightmarish dystopia seemed, to those who opposed Nixon and his crackdown on anti-war activists, right around the corner: dissidents would be rounded up and used as little more than cannon fodder in military training exercises. Watkins is still the master of the alternate-historical documentary, and for its target audience, the scenes (mostly improvised by an amateur cast) of sneering young soldiers putting increasingly hysterical political prisoners through their paces must have come across as chillingly plausible. In later years, the film became hard to find, which might have seemed for the best: with the eschatological frenzy of the Vietnam era beginning to fade, it probably came across as increasingly strident and paranoid, with every thoughtful dissenter who claims that in a time of government oppression, the honorable path is that of a criminal, there’s an overblown windbag spitting at the pigs and screaming about the Man. It finally came to DVD at just the right time, though: in the post-9/11 era of the USA-PATRIOT Act and governmental scorn for Constitutional protections, it was newly relevant. Latter-day conservatives feverishly dreaming of being locked in confiscation camps by Comrade Obama might even find something to like in it, if its protagonists weren’t a bunch of dirty hippies.
Click Here For Part One, Part Three & Part Four
Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce