Today’s Vault is a consideration of a delightful if seldom seen trio of films that you might want to consider. All of them are a little to a lot older and are the product of scattershot viewing of late by your humble host.
We feature today a horror film, “The Descent,” a foreign film, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” and, the grand-daddy of our troika, a classic film, “Paper Moon.” All are recommended but each is for a decidedly different taste.
The Descent
2005: Neil Marshall
Rated R: 99 minutes
Vault Rating: 7
A little scary movie, “The Descent” is nice in the way of some of Sam Raimi’s early work. Small on budget, it takes an unknown cast and places them into a nebulous dreamworld.
Indeed, the psychology of this film is interesting on many levels. It is, after all, the psychology of terror that makes the genre tick, and tick “The Descent” does.
The film is unusually feminine as it deals with the personalities of a group of adventure seeking women whose annual trips are bracingly dangerous and which rely on their team-work and self-reliance for success. In the adventure at hand, the ladies choose a spelunking trip and they prepare like seasoned professionals. But for a key misstep (Isn’t there always a key misstep?) they wind up trapped underground.
When crossing the female psychology with the tricks caving plays on one’s mind the director is taking the viewer into a tense subjective reality. Is what we are watching real? Does the camera reveal anything about the current point of view in the narrative? It is like being sea-sick and trying to find one’s legs. Vault has always found films that walk this line particularly disturbing. (See, for example, Roman Polanski’s squeamish psycho-drama, “Repulsion,” for a particularly wild gut check.)
The women, literally and figuratively, are trying to get to the surface, but it is hard, in the damp, pitch dark to know which way is up. The women are lost in a womb-like cavern that is also labyrinthine like the corridors of the mind.
Perhaps we over-analyze, but we like the ground this independent film attempts to tread. If one simply takes the story at face value, it is less challenging but equally fun when our heroines encounter a strange type of subterranean predator. What IS lurking down there? That is the question we are most game for.
It is October. There is a certain chill in the air. You also need one in your home entertainment center.
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 days
Romania: 2007
Dir: Chrisian Mungiu
Rated R: 113 minutes
Vault Rating: 8
“4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days” is the term of a woman’s pregnancy cut short by an abortion, illegal in the totalitarian days of 1980s Romania.
Shot through the eyes of best friend Otilla (Anamaria Marinca), who proves the gold standard of friendship, we are taken on a dark ride into an awful black market where a price is set, a meeting is arranged and nobody is safe.
The film has no time for moral expediency and we are not sure if we learn anything here, but this is doubtlessly a story born of truth and one that is important in the telling. There is so much fear and brutal honesty being brought to bear here, that the viewer is left wondering whether they’re in a horror show or one of the more powerful documentaries of the day.
Where demanding, unfeeling abortion doctors, such as we are shown, wear black leather, can’t make house calls and fear prison, especially given the late term of the title, we are left with a woman making a terrible sacrifice all by herself, utterly alone.
Where the night time burial of an aborted fetus takes on an air of danger rather than solemnity, we are left wondering at such a society as Ceausescu’s Romania.
Some history, which our film does not reveal, shows that Nicolae Ceausescu decreed in 1966 that all abortion should be illegal. He thought the population of his country should be 25 million, an increase of six million over the actual population. Apparently, Ceausescu wanted a larger labour force. His decree lasted until his overthrow in 1989.
For almost 25 years, women, caught between a lack of contraception and “Decree No. 770,” were criminalized unless their personal decisions mirrored the wishes of the state. In short, the story we see in today’s film has happened countless times, a quiet nightmare that nobody could even talk about. Small wonder that the corresponding maternal mortality rate tripled under Ceausescu. In short, today’s story really needed telling.
Here is a link to a short article, written after the overthrow of the dictator, from which I drew some of the above. It is a harrowing few paragraphs that comes right to the point. Click here to check it out.
Paper Moon
1973: Peter Bogdanovich
Rated PG – 102 minutes
Vault Rating: 7
No matter what you think of Ted Turner, his Turner Classic Movies channel is a boon to every serious cinefile who doesn’t get out to the theater much.
Mrs. Vault, Kid Vault and I recently had the undeniable pleasure of choosing “Paper Moon,” Peter Bogdanovich’s Oscar Winning depression era romp about a con-man and his could be daughter. It is one of the best “buddy” or “road” pictures ever.
Ryan O’Neal is a bible selling con artist named Moses Pray who, out of some misplaced shred of honor, attends a former girlfriend’s funeral. At the graveside he is saddled with the orphaned tom-boy, Addie Loggins (O’Neal’s 10 year old daughter, Tatum), who he is supposed to deliver to her aunt somewhere in the next state over.
Moses, given this bit of bad luck, decides to make use the child in various schemes. Addie is a quick study, though, and before long she is keeping the finances and the team is pulling down more money than ever before.
It is here that the possibility of a father-daughter relationship makes the movie more than a caper flick. There is a heart to the film now, reminiscent of the relationship that followed three years later between Buttermaker (Walter Matthau) and Amanda Whurlitzer (Tatum again as a curve-ball throwing little leaguer) in “The Bad News Bears.” And the film takes on a better trajectory given that Moses and Addie’s journey must come to an end at an unknown auntie’s homespun midwestern home.
Their fun, though, is had along the road as they take on bootleggers and a particular flapper, Trixie Delight (played by the inimitable Madeline Kahn), who has Moses in her sights but hasn’t counted on the guile of young Addie.
“Paper Moon” is shot in a beautiful, “Grapes of Wrath-ish” black and white that really plays kindly to the younger O’Neal, who is a tough nosed gem in cinema history. She is , after all, the youngest Oscar winner ever (Shirley Temple won an honorary award at age 6 in 1935.) and she easily upstages her real life dad. Check it out if you have the time. You’ll not be disappointed.