Psychout at the Other Side of the Mirror!

It’s odd how Rossano Brazzi’s Psychout for Murder and Jesús Franco’s The Other Side of the Mirror, indirectly correspond each other. Adrienne Larussa (as Licia in Brazzi’s) and Emma Cohen (as Ana in Franco’s) are actually two astonishingly mysterious B-Movie queens struggling with the Electra Complex and their fathers in the psychedelic pop miasma. While Licia kills to find her way back to his industrialist father again, Ana is haunted by his father’s ghost who won’t leave her daughter alone; driving her to kill her lovers, so finally they can reunite at the border of life and death.

Two less-known examples of the carefree, untamable and heedless countercultural exploitation cinema, that prove how some films can affect and delight us by replacing lack of their coherent narrative and logic with upbeat, raw atmosphere and sensuality. Something that goes beyond massive electrifying techniques and structualizations. Rising right out of sincerity and restless rebellious spirit to wholeheartedly make films - not masterfully but maniacally.

Girlfriends vs. Times Square

Coincidentally my last night viewing turned into a sudden double-bill watching. Watching Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends and Allan Moyle’s Times Square sort of led me to a comparative thinking. While the first, pinpoints a decline of an era, the latter manifests the uprising of another epoch. Although both concerning the issues of female friendship in New York, Girlfriends is focused mostly on the distance and separation of its two protagonists, Susan and Anne. A sad farewell to the deeming (hippie-feminist) idealism of the 1970s; A pre-mumblecore dealing with questions of personal/social despair and giddiness.

But, Times Square, as the other side of this coin, takes up where Girlfriends left off. On the contrary, Nicky and Pamela form an almost seemingly impossible duo, as two ill-matched teenagers from different social classes and backgrounds. And here, they can find same ambition and idealism to rock on by: Punk is there, and so literally the “Anarchy in the U.S.”

No wonder Susan in Girlfriends was so enthusiast of photography, as if it was the only way to capture and save what was disappearing right in front of her eyes; she should have taken pictures before all the ideals, dreams, and memories of the decade vanish into thin air. But the Moyle’s teens find a resisting bastion at the beginning of 1980's Times Square, they don’t save or capture, all they (need to) do is to shake the city!

A Voyeurism Without Gaze

Unlike the erotic surrealism mastery of his peer-filmmakers such as Buñuel, Robbe-Grillet and even Raúl Ruiz, Pierre Zucca in his Roberte (adapted from Pierre Klossowski’s novel) tends mostly toward a “non-professionalism” and aesthetical economy. Where the enchanting force of his work is driven by an atmospheric sense of strangeness and oddity, an ambient surreality: a complex simplicity, when precisely less is more!

Roberte takes place amid the illusionary world of mirrors, theatrical backdrops and mysterious urban labyrinths (Rivettean) which all perfectly reflect and encompass the vanity and anxious bewilderment of her eponymous character’s psychological/mental space and the masculine social bourgeoisie she’s entangled within - which can also provoke apparent resemblance with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

Roberte’s sexual nervous breakdown is split between various men, like her body which is chopped off of its wholeness as Zucca applies many fragmented/detached shots of the hands and legs to depict and convey this sense of corpo-mental shattered-ness. That’s why the voyeuristic aspect of the film is never delivered as a complete uninterrupted totally, and that’s where Zucca transcends the mere voyeurism to a higher level of imaginative imperfection - a liberated eroticism rather a manipulative pornography. Remember how the film by each step and twist is led to even lose its sound and color at the end, closing with a graphical design of a keyhole in the credits.

Pascal Bonitzer remarkably mentions this aspect of Zucca’s work, when he accurately writes, In Roberte, like all her postures and adventures, what’s evoked is a “crime without violence” and a pornography without obscenity (Cahiers du Cinéma; No. 299, April 1979). So also I would like to add, a voyeurism without gaze.