I Love You: Positively Disturbing Scenes from the Mall
“So you know the words by heart. You can play the tune blindfolded. You can even wear that black leather jacket, chew a cigar, sharp shoes…. keep your hat on. But the question remains- Can you feel the blues? Do you have the soul for it?”
- Toots Sweet
Life can be one helluva drag. We all live with that. Or there’s that gun under the pillow. Too messy, can’t trust your nerves… public transport can take care of that. But do it quick. Do it before they get to you.
‘They’… they’re everywhere these days. Step out the house and they’re looking at you. They’re charming (I have to give them that much), even seductive and they’ll seem about as docile as a pet dog but there in lies the great and fundamental deception. Don’t believe them. Don’t believe in fair skin. Don’t believe in politically active tea or cornucopia of happiness insurance. Don’t believe in the Lotus. Don’t believe the Hand. Don’t believe the cricketers (pray for scores but that’s about it) and as difficult/heartbreaking as it is, don’t believe the ever winking woman who asks you to apply for credit cards. A wink for every time you pass the circle… Bloody fucking whore, I wonder how I couldn’t see through that. After that bitch left me homeless, penniless, hungry, paranoid, destitute, scabbed, dog-bitten… broken everything inside of me that was good and living and the company goonda took away my last belonging of any value I called up my ex-wife and apologized for calling her a ‘massive deep-space vortex that sucked the life force out of me’. I told her she had always been right… I did have a tendency to over-react.
So here I am… on the streets, lugging the sack of all that remains of what once was respectably middle-class, gawking helplessly at all the steel and concrete and glass where only a few months before, I would have been salaamed in at the gates. If I gawk helpless it’s not because of any desire to enter these places, damn them to hell, but what else is there to see. Some parts of the city, you cannot even see the sky without something phallic inserting itself in the view. Sprawl it over, seems to have been the motto. Double mayonnaise on the McMahacity. I don’t claim to anything inside of those walls. All I have is the sack and all the sack holds is the word of the Prophet. His name, make no mistake, is Philip K. Dick. He knew about them and they got him in the end but his word survives, in paperbacks with spaceships and strange planets and multicolored humanoids on the cover. (You can just imagine the fundamental dumbfuckery of them who even repossessed even my cheap China made mixer-grinder but dismissed my collection of Philip K. Dick. The jokes on you, motherfuckers. HA HA.) I don’t want to sound snobbish, but if you’re destitute and paranoid and refuse to accept what is being dealt to you as inevitable, I would recommend Old Phil’s manuscripts. His nemesis, my nemesis, our nemesis… is reality itself or this façade, this pack of blatant lies that struts along as reality but scratch the surface and the bile pours out on everything. Phil’s vision is to introduce that scratch, to fracture this taken-for-granted, none-to-impressive, drab reality in the quest of the truth… the ecstatic truth.
It is science fiction. That’s reality. It is subversion. That is the truth.
Yesterday, I managed to get myself into one of those film society screenings (advice to the destitute or ones soon to be: if you look just about homeless enough and yet manage to be respectable, they will let you in for free. If you don’t want to ruin your clothes atleast muddy your shoes well and sound real apologetic. That seems to work with those sucker NGO-types), and saw not a film but a vision on par with that of Dick- an eccentric, offbeat vision that slightly relocates its reality in the search for the truth and a meditation of the human condition. The vision was that of Marco Ferreri- the Franco-Italian enfant terrible, otherwise known as ‘The Master of Bad Taste’. A most flattering epithet but unfortunately, it fails to convey in full measure the vigor of the vision that the self-described ‘comic anarchist’ brings to his cinema. I remember to have seen a bit of his masterpiece ‘La Grande Bouffe’ (The Grand Feast) which had the 60s greats Marcelo Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Phillipe Noiret and Ugo Tognazzi playing middle-aged men, sick of their plastic, polythene lives locking themselves up in a grand gothic castle and participating in an orgy of food, drink and sex till they were subsumed and killed by the sheer grotesquerie of excess. Nihilist, surrealist, apocalyptic… a vulgar joke gone bizarre until it maddens the mind and sickens the guts. For the part of the film which I saw, it was a tour-de-force orchestrated by a master. Yesterday’s film, not one of Ferreri’s most regarded ones, ‘I Love You’ whilst lacking in the carnival mindfucking brilliance that seemed to possess ‘La Granda Bouffe’, still contains the director’s mad yet vital and frighteningly prophetic vision put forward with rare surreal mischief.
I said it once, I’ll say it again,” The jokes on you, motherfuckers.” Myself included.
HA HA.
‘I Love You’ opens with a panoramic vista of the city and the protagonist Michel (played by Christopher Lambert) not just dwarfed but eclipsed and rendered invisible against the urban sprawl. The character of Michel is something of an art-house/independent film cliché- the alienated, isolated, expressionless stranger seemingly wandering the wretched urban terrain in a constant introspective daze. Ferreri’s take though is refreshingly sans romaticization and Michel is but a soul-crushed zombie of a man. He seems petty and selfish and our only sympathies lie in the fact that it’s not entirely his fault with him living in a fucked up world and also that at moments he reminds you with enough lucidity, of yourself.
Early in the film we witness Michel bidding goodbye to a lover. They meet in his factory-like modern house where he insists on keeping her photographs on the shelf but seems and sounds emotionally blank. Ferreri insists on expositing the break-up sex with bizarre TV images of a cartoon of a vulture attacking a raging bull. Then as the woman is about to leave at the airport, she berates Michel for not asking her to stay back even as she debates with herself whether or not she would have stayed anyway. He gives her a plastic doll calling it a ‘baby’ and she proceeds to break it by slamming it on his head. ‘Would you have done it with a real baby,” asks Michel as the woman walks off. In a world coming apart even as it comes closer, where the real has been replaced by the manufactured, Ferreri etches the ineffable disconnect that keeps people from each other and possibly themselves. And since such subtlety and delicacy is not exactly the director’s forte, Michel soon finds a keychain that responds to his whistle with- “I love you”.
Like most of his films, La Grande Bouffe (four middle-aged men eat and screw to death), By Bye Monkey (King Kong’s son is raised by a man), in ‘I Love You’ too Ferreri stretches a one-punch premise for a joke (man falls in love with a key chain) into the absurd, neurotic reality of the film. It is very much a film set in the 1980s but one could easily classify it as science fiction. The landscape and characters of ‘I Love You’ reminds one of the Perky Pat episodes of Philip K. Dick. In Dick’s seminal work ‘The Three Stigmata of Peter Aldrich’ aka ‘The LSD Astronauts’, the Martian exiles faced with the unbearable isolation and strangeness of the Red Planet are sold ‘Perky Pat’ dolls and accessories by the company which the exiles assemble into intricate scapes of Planet Earth. What the company also supplies and at considerable cost, illegally, is the hallucinogenic Chewy-Z which allows the exiles to enter the reality of ‘Perky Pat’ and simulate the experience of wandering through the cityscapes, walking on manicured lawns and even promiscuous sex. This devious reality of comodification and consumerism is exactly where ‘I Love You’ is set. Words, emotions, relationships all devoid of essence, cheap as money.
Ferreri furiously satires the modern image- the televised image. He lampoons television with a surrealist’s relish- taking a dig at everything from the news to Aerobic shows to reality freak shows to ads. Even Michel’s obsession with the keychain comes to its own as he switches over from a ridiculously baroque porn film to static, places the keychain against it and begins to masturbate. Consumerist fetish has rarely seemed so absurd, so grotesque, so…. Evil. Ferreri ups the kinkiness to a form of sado-masochism especially in the scene just after Michel’s jealousy is invoked when the keychain responds to his friend’s whistle and a mysterious masked black-stockinged woman visits him and he proceeds to have sex with her even as he whistles to his damn keychain. As our hapless protagonist is thrown further down the spiral of deception by one of the most curious femme fatales in cinema, he flings himself in outrage against a wall on his bike and loses his teeth and his ability to whistle. The once cool, uber-composed Michel is now reduced to a mere circus monkey winding his music box on a sidewalk in order to hear those three haloed words from his beloved keychain- ‘I Love You’.
To break this vicious cycle of seduction and addiction, Ferreri strangely invokes one of his greatest films, the counterculture cult classic ‘Dillinger is Dead’, on the television nonetheless and quite suitably, fails to do so. It’s almost like the director is acknowledging that the joke is on him too, motherfuckers. While it is a most odd decision to invoke his own film, it is also a brave one where the director forgoes his God-like position and owns up his own limitations. Just like in the Philip K. Dick books where the narrator on most occasions is as clueless, as trapped and as flawed as the reader.
Thereafter the film literally drifts into the red dawn of the apocalypse.
HA HA. Not quite.
The sensibilities of Marco Ferreri are truly bizarre and resist any attempt to classify them. Mr. Comic Anarchist- neither art-house, nor commercial, nor the limbo called middle cinema. You can’t box him and feel comfortable about it. His mis-en-scene is complex and loaded with meaning. Look closer and you will find the critiques, the subtexts, the symbols, the signs, the odd reference to surrealist painter Giorgio Di Chirico, perhaps even a response to the ‘Cinema du Look’ that had just swept the world cinema scene but Ferreri refuses to treat them as art-installations like the art-house masters would have liked to indulge nor does he allow these brilliant set-pieces to be blunted by the mechanics of the plot, like the commercial and middle cinema directors. Another important aspect of what makes his cinema great is that he is no ideologue. In a telling scene, a woman picked up by his unemployed friend tries to get close to Michel but he instead prefers to whistle to his keychain. The woman suddenly slaps him and berates him and accuses him of preferring subservient women and in the fit on anger, she grasps the hand of his loser friend calling him, of all things, a brave and courageous man. Ideology and prejudices, according to Ferreri seem to limit your understanding of the world. And it’s because of this belief that the beguiling images of Marco Ferreri acquire a rare freedom, thus taking it closer to the truth.
The greatest triumph however of the anarchist is that once you sleep over the film, the next morning acquires the funk of doom. Reality crumbles at the edges and if not completely defeated, acquires that scratch through which you can seen the grand delusion of the world around you. It is at that moment, you realize that the film has metamorphized into a howl. Listen close and you can hear yourself.
HA HA.
It’s not funny anymore.
Consider this a first warning.
The coming monday, I intend to blow up into smithereens one of the steel and concrete phalluses that pollute the landscapes of the world and of my mind. (Requests are accepted as to which motherfucker has to be blown sky high). But if you do indeed work in one of those places, I kindly request you to stay away. Or face the consequences.
It’s not personal, It’s not political. It’s about the blue blue sky. I think we deserve that much. That would be nice.
”The values that once existed no longer exist. The family, the bourgeoisie — I’m talking about values, morals, economic relationships. They no longer serve a purpose. My films are reactions translated into images.”
”The cinema has always been a place open to everyone. When the cinema arrived, for a few cents, people who were rich or poor finally found themselves laughing and crying together.”
- Marco Ferreri
“Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.”
- William Burroughs
Marco Ferreri Links:
Wikipedia
Obsolete Reality
(painting, smoking, eating by Philip Guston, Metaphysical Interior with Large Interior, The Disquieting Muses, Enigma of the Hour, Double Dream of Spring by Giorgio de Chirico, Little Machine Constructed by Minimax Dadamax in Person by Max Ernst, Automatic Drawing by Andre Masson. All pictures by Wikipedia. Marco Ferreri on the sets of Bye Bye Monkey by Stellavista. Music from the OST Bombay Boys via Music Hutch)
Tags: 1986, chistopher lambert, French, i love you, Italian, marco ferreri, philip k. dick, surrealism
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
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Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
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Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
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I love you too.
viva passion! awesome! i’ll remember to muddy my shoes buddy!
i apologize in advance for what’s about to come.
@dabba.. sure thing man.. bring it on..
@Tushar.. in the immortal (spammy) words of Bombay Boys.. yeah yeah yeah yeahh
@magik.. i’ll be watching man
hey sid .. where the fuck did you disappear???
heavy stuff …have to watch the film first thing…how you doin?? ? mailed you once through BTC dont’t know if you received it…??? whats happening?? you coming to mumbai anytime soon??? send me your phone number …
nitin
This review is the blue blue sky. Thank you.
I have printed this on paper…will read it while getting back home.Comments will follow.:)
@siddharth – i meant my post that was published after yours
Nice article dude.
For me Philip Dick is a cult. Flow my tears is like a really awesome book. But and there is a but. The Man in the High Castle is the book, the bible. I read this one cos i have always been infatuated with the Nazis and the holocaust era. But this book is much beyond all that. It is much beyond any novel, actually.
Thanks for your suggestions! La grande bouffe is really good, I agree. Will catch I love you.
Agree completely or not, your write-up just makes me take in the ideas and not say more.
Ill always read your posts. Thank you.
And I’ll def’ly be watching La grande bouffe and ILU…
this is passion for cinema, not passion for writing. buddy, just because you have watched movies that others haven’t seen, doesn’t mean we all have to watch some cult films. does the movie entertain me or not? that’s the first and foremost question we should all ask, IMO. while it’s easy for you to say these things about these movies, but what about industry, and bread and butter of the aam junta? we always have to separate commerce from art. granted that art is wonderful (i have watched godard, and fellini) and must be supported, but without the moolaah, what are you going to watch? it’s important for us to think about these things as we support other movements. there’s a recession, and also a multiplex strike, so we must be careful with what we promote.
Ha ha Dabba, you the man now with the angst against the commoners..Sid, with his mucky shoes wants us urchins to watch Ferreri and understand him and you question his whole purpose?
Sid’s love for the high art is visble but he does not point fingers at the junta, so to say…and you Dabba????
I am too juvenile to venture into Philip Dick yet.
However the beautifully written article reminds me of our conversation when we discussed ‘They Live’ – John carpenter’s ‘accessible’ version of the same concept.
Somewhere along the line I felt that even Stanley Kubrick was trying to say the same with his last film.
Ofcourse the joke is on us all!!
@dabba, ignorance is bliss, more in your case, when you obviously are in dark about what Sid is doing for cinema.
OMG! VPJ, this is so unreal! Just saw They Live yesterday and spoke about you. Over to Sid.
@dabba.. I think your joke was just cracked by Mr. Aditya Oberoi
@Nick.. Man in the High Castle is one i haven’t got my hands on and i always keep a guy’s greatest work for the very end… i’ve read VALIS, Radio Free Albemuth, Three Stigmata, the short stories and i’d recommend any of them… I wouldn’t know how to go about classifying any of his work as good, bad or great.. they all seem to derive from that same dizzy paranoia that a person might feel at his most sensitive.. He was strange and great man.. Ol’ Phil
@VPJ.. like Tushar mentioned.. we caught ‘They Live’ just yesterday and you came up in conversation. As did the similarities with ‘I Love You’. But nonetheless, Carpenter executes a great great film for the first 45minutes. The Riot scene is just a great one for the ages. Later on it does devolve but the goods keep coming and his sympathies always lie on the right side of the fence.. Great carpenter Soundtrack too
Had I read this post under influence, it would have had better far reaching effects.Awefuckingsome post.
Passion for writing coming from passion for cinema.Period.
This is a movie that should be rereleased again in USA. For the current socialist times, this may really mark the turn of the tide when the ivory towers are coming down fast and the working men and women halt the collapse of more ivory towers by their taxes.
I always wondered about Chris lambert. Best fit for scifi movies. will watch this one Sid!!!
Also saw the ‘Eyes Wide shut’ recently. Still recovering from it. A strange and bizarre movie that ties up the four walls and four corners of a city in a way that I am still trying to reason with.
Hi.those first few lines in italics are brilliant. ‘do you have the soul for it?’
I wanted to quote those lines in my own blog. But I’m linking to your post here. Hope that is ok.
hahaha, you bastard!
“muddy your shoes well and sound real apologetic” – suckers man, all these film circle types that I ever met at home. Khudas of giving feeling, stuffed drum beaters all…
Will watch the film… love the writing, as always.
10th time i am revisiting this article.
I love the way you see one movie and introduce us dumbards three masters – two related and a third one who is an influence in every post of yours Sid.
Your writing is inspirational too!!
Keep writing more often.