De Palma’s Domino

Denmark is relatively hawkish when it comes to the War on Terror—not just for a Scandinavian country, but also by European standards. Perhaps that is why Salah Al-Din, an Islamist terrorist mastermind has been focusing on Danish targets. A former assassin with a grudge against Al-Din is out to kill him and his associates, but for copper Christian Toft, the enemy of his enemy is not his friend in Brian De Palma’s Domino—yes, that Brian De Palma, which opens tomorrow in select cities.

Thanks to a flirtatious early morning after a long night of passion, Toft leaves his gun on his bed-stand before responding to what he and his partner Lars Hansen assume to be a routine domestic disturbance. Instead, they run smack into Ezra Tarzi leaving the scene of the crime. He had carved up a bodega owner, whose flat is filled to the brim with explosives and general terrorism paraphernalia. Alas, Tarzi gravely wounds Hansen while escaping from custody, but he does not make a clean getaway.

Instead, he is captured by the CIA, who are happy to aid his quest for vengeance, supplying him with intel and further hardball motivation—as if he needed it. Tarzi already has Al-Din’s YouTube beheading videos of his brother for that. Initially, the Copenhagen cops erroneously believe Tarzi is still with Al-Din’s Dahesh cell, so Toft assumes Tarzi can lead them straight to the terrorist, which is still mostly true.

By all reports, Domino was deeply troubled throughout every stage of production, finally pushing De Palma to largely disavow the film. However, it still shows flashes of the old De Palma magic. He does his usually Hitchcockian thing, while Pino Donaggio, his regular score composer, reaches back into his Bernard Herrmann bag of tricks—and it works more often than you would know from the rest of the reviews so far. In fact, the big, pivotal scene in a bullfighting stadium (the third act shifts to Spain, probably for tax credit reasons) is genuinely vintage De Palma, up there with the Battleship Potemkin homage in The Untouchables.

As Toft, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is a serviceable lead, who looks sufficiently convincing in his action scenes. Guy Pearce practically sleeps through the film playing Machiavellian CIA agent Joe Martin (a case of been there, done that, if ever there was). Søren Malling is largely under-utilized as Hansen, whereas Paprika Steen is completely wasted as his wife Hanne. Unfortunately, Carice van Houten is badly offkey as Toft’s unofficial new partner Alex Boe. However, Eriq Ebouaney is a real standout as the steely Tarzi.

Domino is a grubby, Eurotrashy film that struggles to alienate its core audience with kneejerk moral equivalencies. Yet, it still has moments of grand suspense. It is not De Palma’s worst film, not by a long shot (hello Passion and Redacted). The question is whether it is a last gasp or a harbinger of a final masterwork to come (as John Frankenheimer’s under-appreciated Dead Bang and Fourth War were to Ronin). Sort of recommended for fans of ticking time-bomb-thrillers, Domino opens tomorrow (5/31) at the AMC Rolling Hills in the LA-area and releases day-and-date on iTunes.

De Palma’s Sisters

This early, career-defining film by Brian De Palma probably features the best use of split screens since The Thomas Crown Affair. It definitely has exploitative elements, but it also boasts a fully orchestrated score composed by the legendary Bernard Hermann. Not surprisingly, “Hitchcockian” is often a word used to describe De Palma’s sinister 1972 homage. Freshly restored in 4K, Sisters (trailer here) opens this Friday at the Quad.

Contemporary viewers will pick up on odd echoes and resonances when watching De Palma’s gritty, ever-so-1970s film, starting with the opening sequences involving a voyeuristic game show called Peeping Toms. Phillip Woode has been set-up by French Canadian model Danielle Breton, but his chivalrous behavior earns him her respect and a date to use his free dinner for two. She won a set of Ginzo-esque knives, which should indeed sound ominous.

Breton gets very drunk during their date, but Woode continues to be gallant, driving her all the way home to remote and exotic Staten Island. He also must contend with her stalker ex-husband, Emil. However, the real surprise comes in the morning, when Breton reveals she lives with her twin, Dominique. Alas, it seems Dominique is even more prone to jealous rages, judging from the slasher murder of Woode. Grace Collier, a professionally stalled local SI journalist, sees it all, or at least a good deal of it from her rear window, but her most recent story was an expose on police brutality, so getting the cops to take her seriously will be a challenge.

Of course, De Palma tightly controls just what exactly the audience does and does not see, rather skillfully pulling off a neat feat of misdirection. He alludes to just about every Hitchcock film except Jamaica Inn, but the parallels with Psycho are especially strong, with a dysfunctional sibling relationship replacing Norman Bates’ special friendship with his mother. There is even a terrific scene in which a Life magazine reporter reveals the Breton sisters’ tragic backstory, much like Simon Oakland’s classic Psycho epilogue, but De Palma puts it at the midway point instead.

Sisters is not a perfect film. Arguably, a pivotal but totally nutty flashback-fantasia looks like it could be the ironic work of Guy Maddin, yet for fans, the rough edges are part of its charm. Regardless, its merits far outweigh its shortcomings, starting with its street-level depiction of 70s New York, which is just as effective as a time capsule of the era as Sidney Lumet’s more “respectable” films.

Margot Kidder is terrific as the Breton Twins, in what might be her best role not involving a man in a cape. She is all kinds of creepy and squirrely, but in a way that is entirely different and distinct from Norman Bates and his imitators. Likewise, William Finley immediately established his cult status with his unsettlingly weird turn as the mysterious Emil (probably half his credits come in films directed by De Palma and Tobe Hooper).

Lisle Wilson is quite charismatic and down-to-earth as Woode, making him quite a worthy Marion Crane analog. Granted, Collier is supposed to represent many of the era’s frustrations, but Jennifer Salt’s confrontational portrayal often leads to face-palms. However, ubiquitous 1980s character actor Bernard Hughes (Tron, The Lost Boys) is quite memorable explaining it all as Life reporter Arthur McLennen.

So, is it horror or is it a thriller? Hermann’s Hitchcockian score says the latter. That will be good enough for anyone who takes their movie soundtracks seriously, but people of good conscience could disagree. De Palma worked in both genres, blurring the lines between them with films like Carrie, The Fury, Body Double, and Dressed to Kill. It is still a tense and grabby film that has also become a fascinating cinematic artifact of its time. Highly recommended for fans of De Palma and psycho-killer movies (across genre), Sisters opens this Friday (10/12) in New York, at the Quad Cinema.

NYFF ’15: De Palma

Brian De Palma’s career is marked by distinct streaks of good and bad luck, but he could never complain about his score composers. He worked with John Williams, Ennio Morricone, Pino Dinaggio, Mark Isham (on The Black Dahlia), and most notably Bernard Hermann. Probably no other director so self-consciously tried to process and build on Hitchcock’s visual kitbag for building suspense, so it is fitting two of Hermann’s final scores were for De Palma’s psychological thrillers. The brand name director surveys his filmography, film by film, in Noah Baumbach & Jake Paltrow’s De Palma, which screens during the 53rd New York Film Festival.

De Palma sits in a comfortable chair and basically tells us how it all went down. It is a straight forward approach to documentary filmmaking, but his stories have a lot of zing to them, so it largely works. Reportedly, De Palma has been regaling his young colleagues for years, but now they have finally convinced him to do it on camera.

To an extent, your enjoyment of De Palma the film will depend on how much you appreciate his movies. Still, there are lessons learned here that would apply to any aspiring filmmaker. De Palma does not reminisce about each film’s production dramas. He dishes on their messy development processes too. He seems to remember exactly how much each and every film was budgeted for, which is a lesson in itself.

There is also a good deal of time devoted to his student work and early independent films, most of which will be entirely new material for a lot of his casual fans, who may not know De Palma gave Robert De Niro his first featured role in his very independent Greetings. Frankly, you can largely judge what De Palma thinks of a film by the amount of time allotted to it. For instance, he probably talks at greater length about Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” video than Passion, his unnecessary remake of Alain Courneau’s Love Crime. He is even reasonably forthright revisiting the notorious disaster that was Bonfire of the Vanities.

However, in a glaringly conspicuous (yet convenient) omission, there is no acknowledgement of the controversy surrounding his graphic anti-American anti-war film Redacted. Although it is now generally accepted Arid Uka was motivated by the 2007 film’s violent rape scene, taken out of context and represented on youtube as actual video footage, when he shot and killed U.S. Airmen Nicholas Alden and Zachary Cuddeback in the Frankfurt Airport. Let’s not mince words. Ducking a controversy of that magnitude is just gutless.

Of course, acknowledging De Palma’s polemics evidently played a significance role in such a senseless tragedy would also be a real downer. Baumbach & Paltrow clearly prefer to keep things light. As a result, De Palma the movie is breezily entertaining. It does indeed make you want to revisit some of his classics (like The Untouchables) or catch up with intriguing early films. Recommended for fans of De Palma and 1970s and 1980s genre filmmaking, De Palma screens this Wednesday (9/30) at Alice Tully Hall, as a special presentation of the 2015 NYFF.

The Black Dahlia

The Black Dahlia
Directed by Brian De Palma
Score by Mark Isham
Universal Home Entertainment

Jazz has had a hard time finding its way into film soundtracks, but film noir has sometimes opened the door a crack. Brian De Palma’s adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel, The Black Dahlia, effectively employs a jazz-influenced score composed by Mark Isham in a film that embraces the film noir tradition.

Isham himself has recorded jazz sessions as a leader, and co-led excellent sessions with Art Lande for ECM. He is probably in more demand for his film work in a diversity of styles, including legitimate jazz soundtracks for The Cooler and Afterburn. While not explicitly a jazz score, Isham’s Dahlia soundtrack, featuring his muted trumpet, is clearly jazz influenced and inspired.

Isham’s music, combined with De Palma’s direction and the Oscar nominated cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond, Dahlia lovingly recreates the look and feel of film noir. The dark tones heard over De Palma’s long tracking shot, which begins with the discovery of the Black Dahlia’s body, establish the mood of foreboding menace. Scoring scenes between Josh Harnett and Scarlett Johansson, Isham’s music conveys mournfulness and longing. For femme fatale Hilary Swank’s come hither scenes, Isham’s trumpet themes express romance and danger in equal measure.

It is as film noir that Dahlia succeeds as an entertaining picture, portraying a shadowy, smoke-filled world of police corruption and Hollywood depravity. Sometimes the plot does not make perfect sense, but there is long tradition of frankly incoherent storylines in the genre, extending back to classics like The Big Sleep. The weak link is Harnett, who just does not have the on-screen presence to carry off the role of Detective Bucky Bleichert, coming across more wooden than earnest. Aaron Echhart however turns in a great performance as Bleichert’s partner, the mercurial Detective Lee Blanchard, a flamboyant and nuanced character, who is corrupt but not completely unsympathetic.

The Black Dahlia looks and sounds great. It might not be the best of the genre, but a lot of the elements are brought together nicely.