Moviegoer Diary: Lisztomania, Zabriskie Point

LISZTOMANIA

Plot In A Nutshell
Ken Russell’s delirious 1975 biopic starring Roger Daltrey as 19th-century pianist and composer Franz Liszt.

Thoughts
Oscar season is the perfect time to watch a movie like Lisztomania, which has such utter disregard for the qualities of taste and propriety that the Academy demands from its historical biopics. (Even that ridiculous rock-musical title comes off as a provocation.) This is perhaps the most childish, vulgar, obvious, demented film ever made about a significant artist, and it doesn’t contain a single dull moment. Or a single good performance — but that probably didn’t bother Ken Russell, so long as the action onscreen had been whipped into a sufficient frenzy.

Lisztomania’s, shall we say, less-than-factually-accurate approach to musical biography reminded me in a lot of ways of a much less intellectual version of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There in the way that both Russell and Haynes regard fantasy and fable as a much more useful way of capturing the essence of their subjects than a more scrupulous, linear presentation of their lives would be. Russell establishes his playful tone early on in Lisztomania in a party scene where every guest is a famous writer or composer: Rossini won’t stop stuffing food into his mouth; a sickly Chopin clings pathetically to the leg of George Sand (who speaks in a deep, dubbed-in male baritone); and Richard Wagner, wearing a sailor suit with “NIETZSCHE” inscribed on the cap, makes an anti-Semitic slur to Felix Mendelssohn.

The film’s depiction of Wagner is really something else — I can’t think of a more hilariously irresponsible bit of onscreen character assassination. As played by a madly grinning Paul Nicholas, Wagner is variously depicted as a vampire, a werewolf, and Dr. Frankenstein. In one scene, he drugs Liszt’s wine, sprouts fangs, chomps down on his neck, and literally feasts on his blood. In the film’s final few minutes, Wagner has been transformed into a gigantic Frankenstein monster with a Hitler mustache, lurching down the streets of Berlin and shooting Jews with his electric guitar-shaped machine gun, only to be blown up by Liszt, who has flown down from heaven in a spaceship shaped like an immense pipe organ — I think it was somewhere in there that I decided the movie had truly lost its mind.

But then I remembered that actually it had lost its mind almost an hour earlier during the famous musical dream sequence when Liszt meets Russia’s Princess Carolyn and sprouts a 12-foot-long penis. I had heard about this scene in many places, and yet I never quite believed it was true until I saw it with my own eyes. Yes, at one point five dancing girls straddle the penis and do synchronized kicks. Yes, they attach harnesses to it and drag Liszt around the floor. And yes, the scene ends with Princess Carolyn inserting the penis into a guillotine and chopping it off. I have no idea what this scene is meant to symbolize.

Ken Russell doesn’t seem like a very fashionable director anymore — a glance at his IMDb page reveals that he hasn’t stopped working, but as far as I can tell, the last film he directed to get significant distribution in North America was 1991’s Whore, starring Theresa Russell. Which is too bad, because just about every biopic from last year would probably have been improved tenfold if Russell had directed it instead. Wouldn’t you rather have seen Russell direct W. instead of Oliver Stone? Wouldn’t the Ken Russell version of The Other Boleyn Girl have made much more memorable use of Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson? And what about a marquee reading Ken Russell’s Milk? The mind boggles.

RATING: 3.5/5

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ZABRISKIE POINT

Plot In A Nutshell
Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 drama, set against the backdrop of student unrest on college campuses in southern California, about a pair of young anti-establishment types (Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin) who have a brief but passionate encounter in the Arizona desert.

Thoughts
I first heard of Zabriskie Point when I was maybe 11 or 12 and I nagged my grandfather into buying me a copy of Harry and Michael Medved’s book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, which I had spotted in a bookstore and whose premise instantly captivated me. The book is actually an interesting artifact; it was written before the Medveds had ever heard of Ed Wood and before they started concentrating mainly on schlocky sci-fi and horror from the 1950s and ’60s. There were a few cheapie genre titles among their chosen 50 — movies like The Horror of Party Beach, Eegah!, and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians — but they also included oddities like the 1937 biopic Parnell with Clark Gable, or the Ronald Reagan/Shirley Temple melodrama That Hagen Girl, titles which never come up anymore in any discussion of legendary bad movies.

The Medveds also included three unexpected argument-starter titles in the book — movies by respected international directors that enjoyed (unjustly, in their opinion) a certain amount of critical cachet. Besides Zabriskie Point, Last Year at Marienbad also made their list, as did Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. The Fifty Worst Films of All Time may have been the first book of film criticism I ever owned, and it had enough of an impact on me that I avoided Sam Peckinpah for decades. Only in the last couple of years have I realized that he’s actually one of my favourite directors, and Alfredo Garcia is probably my favourite of his movies.

What’s the moral of the story? Don’t listen to Michael Medved, I guess — but you probably knew that already. My point is, it took me all these years to finally get around to tracking down Zabriskie Point, lured to it mainly by accounts I’d read of the famous (and intriguingly stupid-sounding) “everything blows up in slow motion” ending, but also hoping the Alfredo Garcia effect would be repeated.

That didn’t quite happen — Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin are the most beautiful young revolutionaries in movie history, but the magic disappears whenever they open their mouths to speak. (If you watch the movie with a friend, you can have fun trying to figure out which lines were written by Sam Shepard.) Still, Zabriskie Point is not the most dialogue-heavy film ever made, and there are long stretches where Antonioni builds a powerful mood of alienation simply by expertly chosen shots of the fascinatingly ugly urban landscape, with garish signs and advertisements taking up every square inch of available space. When the action shifts to Zabriskie Point, a vast, blasted-out gypsum desert in Death Valley, the featureless, uncolonized landscape ought to come as a relief, but it’s as bleak and unwelcoming as the corrupt city.

It’s kind of a brilliant move on Antonioni’s part to stage Frechette and Halprin’s sexual dalliance in the sand of Zabriskie Point instead of one of those lush green meadows most counterculture movie lovers usually frequent. The two of them strip and caress each other, and they might as well be on the moon; the image is Elvira Madigan by way of Cormac McCarthy. As the scene progresses, it slides into fantasy as dozens of other young seminude couples appear around them, cavorting in the dust. It’s a nice concept, but the sexy young extras Antonioni recruited from Joseph Chaikin’s Living Theatre are way too self-conscious in front of the camera — watching them pose and make “dramatic” expressions at each other brought back all-too-vivid memories of every pretentious “physical theatre” piece I’ve ever endured as a local theatre critic.

I’m shuddering just thinking of it. How about we clear our minds by watching a desert mansion blow up over and over again?