Siesta vs The Shining
Siesta (Mary Lambert, 1987)
Tomorrow, at the beginning of my siesta, come for me.Claire (Ellen Barkin) wakes up near the runway of an airport, blood all over her dress, and realises that she is in Spain, and that something terrible has happened.
We flash back, finding out that Claire is a daredevil skydiver about to perform a perilous stunt, thought up by her husband, Dell (Martin Sheen). She will jump from a plane without a parachute, onto a flaming net suspended over the mouth of a volcano in Death Valley. She receives a mysterious letter, and she has to leave for a couple of days… for Spain! There, she meets
Augustine (Gabriel Byrne), a trapeze artist. She used to be his pupil and his lover, which means he can say stuff like this:
"Listen to me Claire, I taught you to fly, you chose to fall. What you're doing has no meaning. Your life means more to me than my own."
"Is that why you married someone else?"Later, meeting secretly (and for the last time, apparently) at his siesta, they reminisce:
"Do you remember when we were working at the circus and we crept out in the middle of the night, then made love in the cage with the lion sleeping inside?"
"I remember it was so dark. I didn't even know he was in there."He is recently married to Marie (Isabella Rossellini). Things are not looking good, flashback-wise
Back to present time, and she now realises she has done something bad, something really bad, and she thinks,
"please let it be her, not him."So, she's essentially on the lam, with no money, and she comes across these characters:
Alexei Sayle as a Spanish taxi driver, who will take her where she wants to go, but...
"F*ck first, then Angeles…A pre-
Accused Jodie Foster (god I miss that Jodie…) as Nancy, with big shoulder pads and a British accent:
"Here I am. In a bathroom, utterly pissed, alone on my birthday. Without love, without money. Asking myself, what else is there?" And then Julian Sands as Kit, wearing a white linen suit. He recites bawdy limericks like
The c*ck of a fellow named Randall,
shot sparks like a big roman candle,
he was much in demand,
for his colours were grand,
and the girls found him too hot to handle.and shoots off lines like
"Would you like to put your hand inside my pants?" The girls love him, though.
He has a senstive side:
"Give to the world the best you have, and the best will come back to you. This means a lot to Claire.
And even Grace Jones as Conchita! Conchita has a pet rat.
We also get bedroom scenes where Jodie and Julian (wearing a pearl necklace) get it on, while a newly shorn Barkin lies next to them, having flashbacks of her own tryst with Gabriel.
Then she tightrope walks. (It really is Ellen!)
The film, is, of course, batshit crazy. Being an 80s Ellen Barkin film, there is up-top and down-low nudity. That's just the way it is. It was good to see a couple like Byrne and Barkin, with their matching bumped noses.
It also seems custom made for cultish deification, with heightened dialogue and acting, a Miles Davis soundtrack, and a modish 80s pop-art sensibility. As it is, it was as fun as I remembered it being, and I was definitely never bored. Crazy sh*t just kept happening. Weird timeshifts, random nudity, crazy lines, and frenetic sets of characters, storylines and dream logic that just never lets up. An awful lot of window dressing, but also an wilful, guilty indulgence. Great stuff.
The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
Let the screenshots do the talking.
[SPOILERS!]The film is a stroke of perverse, black comedy, tension-laden genius. Submerging much of King's supernatural concerns into a study of writer's block, failure and domestic violence. It's also a radical deconstruction of the haunted house motif (heck, a whole ton of horror motifs), paring it down to a gorgeous, shiny, modernist veneer, and having a good laugh at the squirming of the audience.
It's probably my favourite use of music in film. The terrifying, overwhelming soundscape of dissonant avant garde modernists (I had the headphones up way too high, and I loved it!), or the silly humour where the clanging of the cymbals, or drums, or whatever signify another title card. Then there's Jack throwing the tennis ball against the Indian mural. Hilarious.
There's the relentlessly tracking camera, following everyone as they walk through the enormous hotel. Danny on his trike (the hum of the wheels on the hard floor, the silence as he goes over the rugs), or Jack with his axe.
There's also the stilted, polite, and slightly absurd dialogue, especially the small talk between newly introduced people. An intense concentration on mundanity, showing the family through the hotel, talking to Jack about his responsibilities over winter, preparing food. It creates an odd, unsettling atmosphere of something lurking, unspoken, just beneath the surface.
This makes Jack's slow burn, and then break down, all the more enjoyable. His simmering resentment -
"This is so f*cking typical of you to create a problem like this when I finally have a chance to accomplish something. When I'm really into my work… Wendy, I have let you f*ck up my life so far, but I am not gonna let you f*ck this up!" - is stripped down to its bare essence in the isolation of the hotel. Faced with failure, a complete inability to accomplish anything, psychotic violence is the only corrective.
***********
Verdict: enjoyable though
Siesta was, there's really no competition when it comes up against the greatest of all black comedies.
The Shining wins.