Reviews

R.L. Stevenson's Dr Jekyll is a bachelor in his 50s with no need of a life companion. Yet almost all the films give him either a wife or a girlfriend. H.P. Lovecraft's Charles Ward is a teenager with a passion for knowledge who grows to his mid-20s by the end of the book. He has no time for girlfriends or any other other option. The Charles Ward imagined by Roger Corman, Charles Beaumont and Francis Ford Coppola is an anti-intellectual concerned only that the 'palace' that he has inherited may be worth something, and who brings along his trophy wife who is a full generation younger. This is a gratuitous heterosexualization that ruins the story. Unlike Stevenson's, Lovecraft's life and work have not opened up to queer readings, but heterosexuality is something alien to their asexuality.

'The case of Charles Dexter Ward' is first and foremost a tale of an obsessive intellectual quest. This gives it its power and its charm. As the film jetisons this completely, there is no way that the film can work. It is also the secondary quest of Dr Willet who attempts to follow young Ward's path. Who, having read the novel, could forget the lone journey of Dr Willet in the tunnels he finds under the farmhouse (not palace), and what he finds before and after losing his light, and the intervention of the literal deus ex machina. What is in the film is a pale shadow.

There are many good ideas in the novel. Corman, Beaumont and Coppola seem to be afraid to use them. Their influence is the horror-movie cliches of the '60s, and they are afraid to deviate from them.

Despite over 300 comments, some people are still posting saying that it was beyond them and what do the rest of us see in it. Those naysayers should actually read the posted comments.

I watched the film twice, read Marc Behm's book and then watched it again. I would like to see the original film version, 'Mortelle randonnée'(1983) (it has a really good soundtrack album by Carla Bley), but so far have not found a video-rental shop that has a copy. Like the director, Stephan Elliott's major film, 'Priscilla, Queen of the Desert', 'Eye of the Beholder' is a road movie about eccentrics, one of whom is into wigs and changing her appearance. Like Marc Behm's script for 'Charade'(1963) it is about a spook who is looking after a young woman who doesn't really know what is going on. I can't think of any parallels with Marc Behm's Beatles film 'Help!'(1965). Actually Behm has 13 IMDB credits, and most of them are difficult to find. As are his other novels.

The major improvement over the book is the addition of the hi-tech snooping equipment. The book's Eye is an old-fashioned gumshoe who simply looks though bedroom windows and the like. Also the making the lost daughter's ghost more solid is an interesting effect. We don't have to know that the girl is dead to think of the image of her as a ghost. I didn't notice that she is played by two actors. The problem is that Ewan McGregor is too young for the role. At the end of the book he dies of old age. I think that the book captures his slipping into obsession better, and part of the picture is that Joanna Eris is about the age that his daughter would have been. A side-effect of his computer tools etc, is that it becomes more unlikely that he would not be able to find his ex-wife and daughter. But as the film makes him a Brit in the States, they would be back in Britain.

Obviously the script had to drop a lot of the incidents in the book. In the film it is extremely implausible that he is able to get a room next to Joanna in the New York hotel. In the book he tails her for several months through a few murders, which would give him a chance to take a sublet in the building.

The rich blind man is called 'Forbes' in the book. Given the real-life family of that name, it was probably best to change it.

In the book the scene where Joanne is identified in the restaurant where she is working, takes place in New Jersey. In the film it is said to be Alaska, although we know that it is somewhere in Quebec. Why didn't the film say that it was Quebec. Then the crew would not have to work so hard hiding all the French signs. I presume that in 'Mortelle randonnée' all the places were changed to places in France (where apparently Marc Behm lives).

An ironic detail. The book has several cross-dressing incidents: the Eye does nanny-drag to continue his surveillance; Joanna and a woman friend not in the book do male drag to rob banks and filling-stations, and the Jason Priestley character, Gary, is a cross-dressing fetishist. I suppose that the director of Priscilla feels that he has done the topic.

I would have liked the film to have kept the incidents where Joanna almost recognizes the Eye, including the time when she hires a detective to capture him.

The film has a lot more in it than most thrillers. It avoids the cliches, challenges the viewer, but doesn't really gel. There are too many nagging questions afterwards.

Actually as a documentary of the Wodaabe, this television film leaves much to be desired. There is a brief discussion of the enlarging Sahara and the problem of lack of rain. However this is undercut by actually filming just after one of the rare periods when it did rain. There is also a brief segment on the shanty town next to the uranium mines. Then these are dropped. The major interest is the male beauty competition. The faces of the contestants are scanned as an introduction, and most of the second half of the film is about the competition. This aspect is certainly interesting, and the young men's makeup and clothing is in dramatic contrast to construction of masculinity in the dominant global culture. We think of such makeup and restrictive clothing as feminine. Their appearance is somewhat like drag in Europe/North America, but then yet again is quite different. When the selected young woman walks past the finalists, she does not look them in the face - she appears to be looking mainly at the ground. This aspect of Wodaabe femininity should be explained and contrasted to other male-female interactions.

Do they use mirrors to apply their makeup. None are seen, but some of the young men are holding their hands as if they have a mirror, but this is not confirmed by the camera.

Amazingly, there are no tourists at the festival. Only the German camera crew. We are not shown how the Wodaabe relate to being filmed by these foreigners.

As this film was made for French television, and the opening titles and commentary and the closing credits are in French, should not the French title be the prime one?

I saw this film as part of the Ottawa Latin American Film Festival. Half-way through I thought that it was the best film in the festival, but at the end I just felt annoyed. There are some good ideas: the events of the past seen only through the SUV's rear-view mirror; the slow realization that those events and the old car are in fact 15 years ago; the diagetic video record shows the same event as the memory flashback but with the grandma instead; the photographer leaving his own body and the grandma having to hold him bodily to keep him together. But some things that would appear to be important do not seem to be answered. Possibly they were lost in the subtitles. Why is the truckdriver killed at the beginning? Why does the grandma put a spell on this photographer? Why do the police never investigate any of the killings?

And on a different level: The woman who plays the grandma looks quite a bit like Joan Plowright, but is presumably a different person.

Note to the creators of subtitles: In a film such as this where the subtitles translate two different languages, Spanish and an aboriginal language, could it be indicated in some way, e.g. by colour, which language is being spoken. And also please get a native English speaker to proof read the subtitles.

This film came out 12 years years ago, and was a revelation even for people who knew something of the drag scene in New York. The textbooks on drag performance say nothing of these vogueing houses. Anthony Slide's 'Great Pretenders' says nothing. Julian Fleisher's "The Drag Queens of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide" with its flow chart of influence that pulls together Julian Eltinge, Minette, the Warhol queens, and the 90s club scene - and postdates the film - ignores the houses completely. Even Laurence Senelick's "The Changing Room" - the closest thing that we have to a definitive book on drag performance rushes quickly past the film and does not give the background information that one would have expected from it.

I understand from the film itself,and various articles I found on the web that this house system goes back decades. The major film performance by a house member prior to 1990 seems to be Chrystal La Beija in "The Queen", 1968. The historical context is the biggest missing part of "Paris is Burning".

The film is valuable because it focuses on a scene otherwise being ignored. It is a valuable snapshot of life in 1989. The unfortunate fact that Venus Xtravaganza was murdered during filming provides a very dramatic ending, but this is not the only film about transsexuals to include a real-life murder. As we now know, Dorian Corey had a mummified corpse in her literal closet, but this did not come out until three years later.

Of historical importance, but we still need someone to do either a book or a documentary film that provides more context.

An unusual but hard-to-find film. Laura and Roland hitch-hiking but soaked by the rain intrude into a nearby farm house. Osvald who lives there behaves very oddly, and offers accommodation to Laura only - Roland must leave. Surprisingly they accept these terms. When Roland comes back, Osvald offers to buy Laura, and offers US$billion - a totally fabulous amount so large that resistance crumbles. Laura is certainly for the deal. Are we to accept the given account - that the money was a gift from a magical fish that Osvald let go? Certainly the money is there in gigantic boxes. But is this a fairy story, or some other kind?

However reality will waver. The ending redoes the story as if it were by David Lynch. Intriguing.

The best joke here is the one stolen from Crocodile Dundee (where it is used twice), that is, the first man impersonating a woman is played by a female actor.

The problem is the homophobic stereotypes. Sure the film is trying to laugh at homophobes, but in reproducing untrue and unlikely details about gays and transgendereds (that are repeated by the gender insecure) it reinforces them. What it comes down to is: how funny is it? The more funny you find it, the less the homophobia matters. One also suspects that the jokes are funnier for people who are insecure with these topics. And when the jokes fall flat, one begins to wonder ...

A must for fans of derrière-garde inauthenticity.

Abandoned in Paris with no work permit and no savings, when her art-dealing (illegal) Polish husband is sent to prison, Marya Zelli (Isabelle Adjani) accepts the hospitality of the Heidlers, Lois and H.J.(as Lois invariably calls him) which, probably inevitably, involves her providing bed service to H.J. The video box describes the Heidlers as a "freethinking British couple" - if you can accept a couple, with such limited self-awareness and inability to talk through their problems, as freethinkers.

The film is based on the novel by Jean Rhys, based on her own experiences with Ford Madox Ford who presumably had more going for him than H.J., or else he wouldn't be in all those books on the literature of the twenties. Apparently Ford helped Rhys with her novel, and after he tired of her body got her a ghost-writing job on the Riviera. Rhys' husband was out of prison and had abandoned her before she moved in with the Fords. Presumably her major motivation was her devotion to her writing. Marya Zelli, in the film is not a writer, and she stays in Paris because her husband is still in prison. She says more than once to Lois that if given 100 Fr she would disappear (back to England where she could legally work?) but she gets 250 Fr just before moving in with the Heidlers when she sells almost everything she has to the hotel concierge.

Thus while the film is of the desperation of no choice, Marya has in fact fewer options than the real-life Rhys, and the film ending where Marya is thrown on the mercy of her husband's acquaintance from prison, is very bleak, unlike Rhys' fate of being ejected to a writing job.

Made the same year - 1950 - as Rashomon which is acclaimed for retelling the same story several ways, The Woman in Question does the very same, allowing Jean Kent to portray five rather different versions of Astra, the fortune teller. The women in the film are much better drawn than the men, despite both the director and writer being themselves men, and despite the narrative framework of the all-male police team. Some would attribute this to Asquith's gay perspective. The combined portrait of Astra is not very flattering, especially her refusal to visit her dying husband, and in her using Pollard, the pet-shop keeper, to work for her for free, but then refusing his polite advances, she is walking a dangerous line. The underlying sadness of her person comes through, but she is not as sad as Pollard.

The outstanding secondary character is Mrs Finch, the nosey neighbour from next door who never stops talking. Hermione Baddeley, in the part, practically steals the first part of the film to the extent that the rest almost seems like an anticlimax. Her characterization, her way of speech, the hairnet and the pinafore, owe a lot to the English tradition of comical working-class characters that goes back to renaissance theatre, was developed in the Music Hall, and is a precursor of the Monty-Python housewives chatting over the back fence. That is, it is very easy to see her as done by Dan Leno or Al Reid. A change of emphasis and we have a drag routine.

Although Malagasian, there is much in this film that restates the myths of Europe as far back as the Greeks and before. The hero, Kapila, is exposed as a baby, in a cow pen no less, and is injured before a foster mother, who is a shroud make, takes him away to the city. Like Jason and many other heroes he grows up lame, and with special powers. He is aided by a mysterious older blind woman, who may be something other than human - In Greek myth she would have been Teiresias. As a young adult, Kapila returns to his village of birth to find his father and his destiny. The time setting of the story is also mythic: there are railway stations, but not cars. A very moving film.