Tag: WTF

Dir: Alain Fleischer
Star: Catherine Jourdan, Klaus Kinski, Pierre Clémenti, Piéral

There are probably stranger movies out there, but I’m not sure I’ve seen one. This is the kind of film, carrying massive artistic pretensions of “meaning,” which would typically have me gnawing my own limb off to escape. I think if I had actually been forced to sit down, and devote my entire attention to this  nonsense for its full running-time, that would likely have been the case. But, I will confess, I took advantage of the subtitles, and spent the last 50 minutes running on our treadmill. This is probably not the way the makers intended their creation to be appreciated, but what can I say? It worked for me, and I would recommend something similar to viewers, since this probably works better as background art, like a painting on the wall of a room, rather than as something to which you must devote your full attention.

I can’t really provide much of a coherent synopsis here, since obscurity is the film’s middle name. I’m going to crib shamelessly from other sources. Unfortunately, when you Google “Zoo Zero”, the IMDB.com information says “A cruel dictator rules a Latin American state. Corruption, brutality and exploitation are present every day. A few people begin to organise resistance.” Two things worth mentioning. Firstly, that’s actually the synopsis of another Kinski movie, Kommando Leopard. Secondly, such is the obscurity in which this wallows, it’s not implausible this could be the synopsis here too, because there are definite references to what appears to be the death of General Franco. Fortunately,. Letterbox.com is slightly better informed:

Eva is a singer in a Noah’s Ark themed nightclub, where the guests wear animal masks. She sings about a doomed love affair between a lion tamer and a lion. She is approached by a stranger who claims to know her and to remember her singing Mozart which she denies. Driven around in her midget manager´s limousine she encounters bizarre characters who turn out to belong to her incestuous family of ogres.

At this point, I’m tempted to insert a clip from Doctor Who, which has David Tennant saying “What?” for about 30 seconds. But I can’t argue with its overall accuracy either, and it has a dream-like atmosphere which means that you just have to roll with its own surreal logic, as the surreal events unfold. They climax in Eva (Jourdan, best known for her supporting role in The Girl on a Motorcycle) and Yavé, the zoo manager played by Kinski, running around the zoo, while arias from Mozart’s The Magic Flute play. Oh, and Yavé speaks entirely through a computer-controlled vocoder; it’s not clear if this was ever even actually Kinski speaking the lines, and they were subsequently treated electronically, or if he managed to get a pay-check, purely for showing up and looking suitably intense.

The film certainly looks lovely, with the art department and lush, blue-drenched cinematography making for a picture that’s pretty as a picture. The characters seem both to exist and to act, simply because the film demands it happen. How else to explain the chauffeur of Eva’s pint-sized manager (Piéral), who carried a ventriloquist’s dummy with him in the front-seat, and with which he will occasionally do political commentary? As with many other things here, I’m sure there’s an intended meaning, but 35 years of time have removed any obvious topical content, and it’s so obtuse as to be completely impenetrable. I did enjoy the use of music: the opening scene had echoes of Cabaret with its staging of the musical number, and the opera score, in particular the Mozart, is also effective, and had me making a mental note to find a full version of The Magic Flute.

Curiously, that opening, where Eva sings about a semi-bestial relationship between a man and his feline, felt almost like it was foreshadowing Cat People from three years later, starring Klaus’s daughter, Nastassja [And I mentioned in my review of Grandi cacciatori, how that, in turn, seems to answer back Paul Schrader’s film] As Kinski roles go, it’s certainly unusual. The deliberately masked timbre of his voice, while disconcerting, is probably preferable to all those films I’ve seen, in which he has been dubbed, by someone who is very clearly not Klaus. Its melodic tones are certainly in contrast to his physical performance, which is like a tightly-wound spring, as he calmly discusses his philosophy with the caged Eva before releasing her, for them to gallop through the zoo. It does take the film about an hour to get there, with much of the early going consisting of Eva being driven around, and to be honest, that isn’t very interesting. Kinski’s appearance provides the film with something it desperately needs: a focus, rather than feeling like turning the pages in a picture-book dreamed up by your subconscious after too many slices of pizza.

On the whole, while I’d still have to class this as a failure, it is at least an interesting failure. Even if it’s not at all clear what Fleischer was attempting to accomplish – perhaps I needed the right mind-altering drugs – and nor is it something I’ll be rushing to re-watch, in terms of cinema as a visual art, this does have its moments.

This is the kind of film which could easily provoke riots at the cinema with its ending, a cheap-shot caption which ranks up there with “…and it was all a dream,” in terms of absolute laziness on the part of writer Luigi Bazzoni. I can only presume the novel on which it was based, Las Huellas by Mario Fenelli (who also worked on the screenplay), was a good deal more rigorous in terms of its storytelling. It’s a shame, as up until the movie’s abject failure to provide anything approaching a suitable resolution, there is much to admire. It looks, thanks to triple-Oscar winning cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, very nice, and Nicola Piovani’s score is also highly effective. Bolkan delivers an effective performance as heroine Alice Cespi, who is initially plagued by dreams of an astronaut being deliberately left behind on the moon, apparently as part of some experiment, run from mission control by Blackmann (Kinski). That turns out to be the tip of the mental iceberg, because when Alice turns up to her job as a translator, the boss berates her for missing days of work, and Alice is shocked to realize a whole chunk of time has apparently gone missing from her life.

Back in her apartment, she discovers a clue, in the form of a ripped-up postcard from the ‘Garma Hotel’, and on a hunch, she travels to the Turkish seaside resort [in reality, it was filmed in Kemer]. There, she meets a little girl, Paula (Elmi), who seems to recognize her – but as a woman with red hair, called “Nicole”. And she is not the only person who appears to remember Alice/Nicole from a previous visit to the town, for one reason or another, a boutique owner and an old lady on the beach also having interacted with her. She is befriended by a visitor, Henry (McEnery), but the more Alice pries out of Paula about her alter-ego Nicole, and what she told the child, the more suspicious she grows about Henry’s motives. Alice also becomes increasingly concerned that persons or a group – perhaps connected to ‘Blackmann’ in some way – are after her, though the reasons for this remain obscure. Did she discover something in connection with her work, perhaps when she was translating at an astronautics conference? Meanwhile, the dreams continue, and do they hold a key clue? Or is she just remembering scenes from a film she saw?

It’s the kind of paranoid, psychological thriller that is a great deal easier to set up than to resolve, and it’s clear that Bazzoni has absolutely no interest in the resolution. Which, I’d probably have been a great deal more okay with, if I had known going in, that there would be only a token effort to tie the threads together – which is so wretched, I wish they hadn’t bothered – I could just have appreciated the atmosphere, which is certainly present in spades. But I’ve always been a believer that cinema should be a story-telling medium, first and foremost; if there are other aspects present, that’s fine, as long as they are built on an adequately-strong foundation of content. Otherwise, you might as well just be in an art gallery, looking at pretty pictures. In multiple places online, I saw this movie described as a giallo, that most Italian of mystery genres; but apart from its total disregard for logic, it lacks the horror and erotic elements which tend to characterize the other entries in the field (though that may be as much my own interests leading me towards that side!).

Kinski’s role is little more than an extended cameo, and I doubt it took much more than a couple of days to film his segments. Indeed, just as in Deadly Sanctuary, it appear that his character has absolutely no direct interaction with anyone else in the movie, since he’s communicating with the astronauts over the radio from a (sparsely populated!) ground control center. Perhaps this is a way directors found to avoid issues? Effectively, keep him in solitary confinement? I’ll have to keep an eye out for this in other Kinski-cameos. It’s a very slight piece, not helped by Kinski apparently being dubbed into Italian, though he does manage to deliver his usual disturbing degree of intensity. If he’d been on the ground in Houston for Apollo 13, he could probably have brought the module home by sheer force of will. However, it certainly counts as a film watched in spite, rather than because, of the Kinski content. And yet, despite the qualms expressed above, I don’t feel like it was 90 minutes entirely wasted. The technical aspects and the lead performance were enough to merit appreciation. It’s just a shame they weren’t in the service of a better script.

Dir: Luigi Bazzoni
Star: Florinda Bolkan, Peter McEnery, Nicoletta Elmi, Klaus Kinski
a.k.a. Primal Impulse, Footprints on the Moon