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2024

Cinema Survey 11

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Hardcore: As my friend James also noted, someone sneezed so hard near the beginning of the movie that they just as loudly groaned, causing the entire theater to ripple with laughter. It’s the only time in recent memory I’ve felt anything like secondhand embarrassment, and damn: it was bad. Sorry dude. I didn’t laugh, and I know that doesn’t mean anything to you, in fact me even bringing it up again here is probably insulting and making the whole thing worse so forget it, your suspicions are confirmed, everyone is thinking about you and they’re mad at you and you’re the problem and you’re going to die alone and unhappy. But I really did feel bad for the guy.

Hardcore isn’t an unfunny movie. For the most part it’s pretty tedious, spending way too much time following George C. Scott as a bumbling amateur detective looking for his daughter in Los Angeles. She’s escaped super-Calvinist Michigan for Skid Row, and her dad dives into the world of massage parlors, 8mm hardcore shorts, porno book stores where you have to pay to get in, porno producers, pimps, and eventually, snuff films. He ultimately rescues his daughter, who inexplicably goes home with him seconds after raving about how she wasn’t kidnapped, she wasn’t there against her will, and that he was the problem all along.

Paul Schrader’s original ending, also inexplicably scrapped, would’ve made the film a masterpiece: rather than descending into rough trade, she’s killed in a car accident just 30 minutes outside of Michigan; Scott only finds out at the end of his completely futile mission, having soiled himself and corrupted his soul and his life unto death. Kind of a bummer, no? Well, the movie as it is is a bummer, and one that doesn’t make much sense or have much momentum. Hardcore, like so many other films, suggests something so much better.

Chess of the Wind: In 1976, Mohammad Reza Aslani’s Chess of the Wind screened just once to overwhelmingly negative reviews. After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the film was nearly forgotten, with only Z-grade bootleg tapes and prints in circulation for 35 years; in 2014, the negative was discovered in an antique shop and was subsequently restored in 2020. Aslani’s film is a bit of domestic intrigue: nasty widowers, scheming sons, and tragic daughters and their secret lovers. Aslani limits the action to the family’s house—which immediately reminded me of Luigi’s Mansion—and a large fountain surrounded by washerwomen gossiping and filling in exposition about the family.

Murders, anxious creditors, burned deeds, sacks of cash, nitric acid—it’s all very Gothic, climaxing much like Hitchcock’s Rebecca, and finally ending with a stunning panorama of Tehran. More than anything, a masterful exercise in mood.

Querelle: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film, a film “about” Querelle de Brest by Jean Genet, not a straight adaptation of the book; Fassbinder was obsessed with Genet’s idea that, in order to become a whole person, one must double themselves. He explored this from a different angle four years earlier in Despair, where he asked if a “descent” into madness and insanity wasn’t instead exaltation and “a journey into light.” In Querelle, Fassbinder succeeds where he failed with Despair: despite all the distancing effects and extreme choices—the vividly colored but obviously artificial set, the intense and deadpan acting style, the implosion of any kind of straightforward plot or exposition—he still manages to create a film that is, above all else, an open heart beating and bleeding hard. Only Fassbinder could make a film this intelligent, heady, and moving.

—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith