Haywire (Steven Soderbergh, 2012)

Haywire displays nearly all the traits of a modern Steven Soderbergh movie. It sports an A-list cast seemingly game for anything. It jet sets all over the world even though it hardly needs to, suggesting that the director A) insists on verisimilitude, B) loves studio-paid vacations, or C) both. Its shallow-focus digital cinematography creates paranoid, claustrophobic frames of doubt and suspicion; Haywire even opens with such abstracted, zoomed-in pixellation that the text telling the audience they're watching upstate New York simply must be a gag. And as with the cast of Bubble and Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience, Haywire features a non-professional actor anchoring the action, in this case retired MMA fighter Gina Carano.

The film also works as the latest in Soderbergh's never-ending line of genre deconstructions. Despite its lean running time of 93 minutes, Haywire leaves gulfs of space around its revenge plot, Lem Dobbs' script asymptotically approaching exposition, only to flatline in vagueness before reaching it. Dobbs, of course, wrote the screenplays for Soderbergh's Kafka and, somewhat infamously, The Limey. Given the amount of dialogue, it stands to reason more of Dobbs' words remain here than in Soderbergh's masterfully elliptical anti-thriller, but Haywire nevertheless shares many qualities with the director's best film. Both are action thrillers that dismantle the conventions of their niches within the genre, finding beauty and agony in the all-too-single-minded attitudes of so many of these films.

Soderbergh and Dobbs frame Haywire as a constant series of glancing blows to coherence. Beginning near the end, the film shows a shivering, antsy Mallory Kane (Carano) walking into a diner in aforementioned upstate New York and enjoying but a moment's peace before Aaron (Channing Tatum) pulls up and instantly sets her on edge. They exchange half-spoken details of a mission in Barcelona and Aaron urges her to come with him. When she declines, he throws coffee in her face and the two proceed to get in a vicious, visceral fight in front of stunned onlookers. Mallory gets the upper-hand with the help of an intervening patron (Michael Angarano), then takes the young man hostage and drives away in his car. While riding, she explains how she got there as the film promptly moves to flashbacks to follow her narrative.

The frequent time jumps become just another way to constantly stay ahead of explaining what, exactly, is going on. Slowly, the film pieces together that Mallory was the top contractor in a private sector firm farming out mercenaries for American black-ops missions. We see the mission in Barcelona alluded to earlier, as well as her betrayal at the hands of her employer and former lover, Kenneth (Ewan McGregor, whose perennial youthfulness makes the idea of the government turning to him for national defense even funnier).

Though he subverts as more tropes than he faithfully portrays, Soderbergh makes one of the more engaging and felt action films of the last few years. He holds his shots out in the fight scenes, cutting judiciously to keep momentum while nevertheless giving the audience a refreshing visual continuity and flow. He didn't hire a trained MMA fighter to be in the lead just to cut around her, and it's thrilling to see Carano take and give blows without all the erratic, stunt-double-hiding editing that defines so many modern fighting movies. This also gives her a screen presence that more than makes up for her stiff line readings, which would throw off the flow of the film in Soderbergh wasn't already doing that so casually with his structure.

Indeed, the director finds other ways to disorient the viewer accustomed to the current slate of beat-em-ups in the absence of shakycam editing. Camera angles constantly find unorthodox framings, while the placement of the camera in fight scenes is, amusingly, farther away and more objective than in the more blurred static moments. There's also the score by Ocean's series composer David Holmes, who brings a similarly jazzy touch to the music here. As Carano runs after a loose end in Barcelona, the exertion and determination on her face is deliberately undermined by the light tone of the music running over the scene. But Holmes' score is no less propulsive and textured than Soderbergh's alternately chugging and lethargic direction. It's the perfect compliment to a strange film, capable of capturing the disparate, often conflicting moods Soderbergh layers into his deconstructive film.

Holmes even offers some clues to what Soderbergh might be doing here in occasionally throwing back to the music of old spy movies. Haywire, more than a mere martial-arts movie, is also a take on the spy thriller. Perhaps the fact that Mallory is not a government agent but a private contractor hired by a government explains the breaks in genre routine. It's not Soderbergh tearing apart this genre, it's the cynical progress of our national defense strategies. McGregor schemes with officials (Michael Douglas and Antonio Banderas), who in turn plot against him when the time comes. In the new world of intelligence and classified assignments, the only goal seems to be to cover one's ass and maybe make a profit if at all possible. Though the pieces eventually come together to reveal who betrayed Mallory and how everyone else she's encountered fell into place, Haywire still leaves disturbingly vague just what it is these people do when they're not trying to kill one of their own.

Brian De Palma: Femme Fatale

After the reception of Mission to Mars took some of the wind out of De Palma's sails, Femme Fatale represented a more modestly scaled return to the director's well of head-trip thrillers. But fresh off the (perceived) defeat of his least ironic bid for a winsomely broad-audience movie, De Palma came up with what may be his densest, most complex work. Taking a page from the Body Double-esque travesty he trotted out every few years since that 1984 masterpiece to remind everyone who's boss, Femme Fatale is defiantly nonsensical and deliberately self-annihilating. Like all the rest of the pure style exercises the director's made since Body Double, Femme Fatale doesn't reach the same heights of anarchic frenzy, but De Palma makes a key choice to move away from mere stylistic flourishes to try to make his flashy neo-noir say something.

Femme Fatale follows Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn), who embodies the titular concept to such a pure degree that the first we see of her is a reflection of her face in a television as she watches one of the quintessential femme fatale movies, Double Indemnity. By the end of the extended and wild opening, she's already seduced a woman and double-crossed her gang of dangerous criminals, and she'll only prove more manipulative from there. But even as De Palma brings out the distilled essence of that character type's destructive properties, he also contextualizes it with equally outsized depictions of the misogyny that surrounds such a character. The head of the criminals she works with at the start (Eriq Ebouaney) slaps her before their mission even begins, and I don't think he ever once so much as refers to Laure throughout the film without using the term "bitch." De Palma, who fielded accusations of misogyny throughout the '80s, makes Black Tie's vulgar harassments so unpleasant that he makes clear his disdain for the masculine brutality that drives so many of his characters. De Palma the offense-baiting provocateur this is not.

But I'm already afraid I've given off the impression that the film isn't a riot, which it is from the start. Echoing the vicious feed-hand-biting of Body Double, the opening sequence, a diamond heist set, of all places, at the Cannes Film Festival, is a deliciously wry slash at the movie industry. Even the most prestigious film gala in the world is not immune to the ouroboric culture of tabloids and calculated buzz: the diamonds targeted by the thieves are worn in an absurd metal contrapion that barely warps around a starlet's supple frame in such a way as to make Princess Leia's metal bikini look like a chador in comparison. Vaguely resembling the director's data theft sequence in Mission: Impossible, this setpiece is outlandishly directed with the usual focus on surveillance and divided frames, but none of the tricks is as amusing as that ridiculous diamond getup. It's telling that the film being shown at the festival is utterly incidental to everything happening around it, and that would be as true if there were no heist to focus the audience. For everyone at the ceremony, all eyes are on Veronica and her only occasionally covered nipples. So, while the rest of the film may not go after the industry with the same rabid mania as Body Double, it nevertheless expands that movie's range of attack to slam the foreign market that has been equally corrupted by promotional interests and empty succès de scandale.

After Laure double-crosses her accomplices, she hides out in Belleville until she can get a fake passport to escape the country. She cannot stay hidden for long, though, and De Palma slowly introduces a wrinkle into the proceedings with a split-screen segment that juxtaposes two very different kinds of surveillance of a wigged Laure. On the left, we see Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas), a sometimes-paparazzo who just seems to be interested by seeing the disguised Laure meeting with a contact wearing fashionable camouflage. On the right are the betrayed criminals who've tracked her down. The two contrasting shots reveal different angles, observations and emotional tones. Though Nicolas peers down from above in a more threatening position, his POV is playful, tracking that which catches his eye. It is the more ground-level view of Black Tie's second-in-command that exudes the feeling of being watched, of being plotted.

Laure retreats into the church nearby, but De Palma maintains the divided screen showcasing two watchers. What changes is who's doing the watching. The right half of the screen continues to show the perspective of a jilted accomplice, albeit a different one. But now the left half belongs to an old French couple who look back at Laure with wide-eyed recognition. Between Nicolas' mysterious curiosity and this pair's even stranger response to Laure, De Palma generates confused, ambiguous moods that only become more disorienting and suggestive when placed against the more simplistic feelings of vengeance and lingering hatred of the criminals. As my blogging buddy Ryan Kelly put it in his own fantastic review of the film, "It's all a matter of perspective."

Ryan rightly pinpoints the film as a moral examination of noir, and he references the hazy, equally nostalgic-yet-critical Mulholland Dr. in De Palma's staging of an extended dream sequence and the way that it dramatically alters the thematic focus of the film. Here, the central divide between dream and reality (or dream and other dream) is the suicide of Laure's doppelganger, the troubled daughter of a French couple who take Laure in after mistaking her for their child. By placing the film on such a dramatic crux, De Palma also invites comparisons to Run Lola Run, an action film in which the protagonist is given do-overs save herself and others. In a sense, Femme Fatale is a more emotive, insightful take on Raising Cain, with its constantly upheaved nightmares deliberately shattering any connection to the narrative. A similar postmodern slyness is at work here, but the abandon of Cain and Body Double is replaced by a nuanced take on a common genre element.

De Palma ingeniously finds a way to make Laure adhere to all the manipulative and sexual traits of a femme fatale while undermining the type's context. The aforementioned misogyny of Black Tie's gang does not necessarily justify Laure's behavior, but it does at least provide a contrast for the usual condemnation of the duplicitous jezebel as an agent of feminine evil. But aggressive sexism is not the only male target of De Palma's lens. Later in the film, when Nicolas stumbles into an insane situation in which he sees himself as Laure's deliverer, she gets one over on him too. De Palma does not spare the condescending, faux-chivalrous knight in shining armor from mockery, undercutting the traditionally acceptable position of a man placing a woman in a position of weakness for the purpose of "saving" her. Ryan links this situation, in which "the woman is the one in charge and the man is powerless," to De Palma's larger canon, but this is powerful even for De Palma; I can't think of an example where he emasculated his male character so incisively.

Romijn handles the role magnificently, suddenly leaping into a double life as the dearly departed Lily and subtly bringing her old self back to light when Nicolas comes back into her life as a different kind of male obstacle. Her toothy smile looks almost bestial at times, sadistic glee crossing her face when she succeeds in getting one over on another man. Her handling of Brado, incessantly revealing her superior planning just when he thinks he's won. But Banderas himself is multifaceted (he even gets to play a double life of his own in a hilarious scene), and Nicholas is cleverer than he seems. If he still finds himself constantly thwarted by Laure/Lily's wiles, the photographer nevertheless is the only man resilient enough to consistently return for more. If De Palma does not let Nicolas off the hook for his presumptuousness, nor does he seek to destroy the man with the same zeal as Black Tie's band of vicious misogynists. There is a willingness to forgive and start anew wholly absent from the director's early, more freeform days.

That new mindset informs one of the most beautiful second chances in cinema, a narrative mulligan that uses the reflexive, even absurdist nature of the story's structure to stage a purely moral reset. I don't know that I agree with Ryan regarding his thoughts on the film's treatment of "fate." I would say that the recurrence of images and events owes more to De Palma's delight in mirror imagery, though the film's final shot certainly supports the idea that, while we can choose our own paths, every possible outcome is at least somewhat guided. But the choices made by Laure after the third act upheaval seem to me more a rebellion against that fate, Laure confronting not only the pre-ordained order of events but her own existential trap. The final shot speaks more to the dream logic of the film, but even if this is all a strictly ordered exercise in style, its redemptive final moments place it among the most moving and intelligent of De Palma's films, the perfect marriage of his deconstructive style with the flecks of deep Romantic maturity that informs his best late work.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar, 1988)

Pedro Almodóvar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is one of the wildest farces in the lurid melodramatist's oeuvre, even as it is also one of the least shocking. The director's pet narrative tics of rape and other forms of abuse are nowhere to be found, with the worst cruelty inflicted by a male upon the female protagonist that of dumping her via answering machine. Even when sexual relations with a terrorist come into play, it is solely in terms of pure comedy, an absurd twist that adds just one more damn hurdle in the heroine's desire to kill herself. Some days you just can't win.

Only a director with a filmography like Almodóvar's could put this material into a film and have it be the one movie of his that isn't a black comedy. Instead, Women is a lighthearted take on his usual gender politics, where the women are hysterical, overwrought and dangerous, but still more appetizing than the men, who are lustful and cowardly and afraid to show the emotions that the women personify. But at the end of every crying jag over deceitful or departing lovers is the realization that they were too good for those assholes anyway, a Lifetime movie message made effervescent and utterly, joyously insane by Almodóvar's singular postmodernization of kitsch.

The opening credits, of vibrant fashion mag cut-ups arranged into collages of fetishized body parts at advertised products, looks like someone took Godard's Une femme mariée and poured paint on it, a montage of commentary as suggestive as it is hilariously dispensable to the story to follow. Almodóvar moves from these credits to a woman, Pepa (early Almodóvar muse Carmen Maura), coming out of her Valium-induced slumber. Her lover, Iván, a smooth-talking lothario, revealed his true colors by breaking up with Pepa by answering machine—not even a damn phone call—but this pathetic move cannot make Pepa see what a horse's ass he is, and she calmly gets another refill of sleeping pills to dump into some fresh gazpacho as a last meal.

Before she can get around to the small matter of offing herself, however, Pepa must deal with a variety of mad distractions. First, her bed suddenly catches fire, which she finally puts out after impatiently watching the conflagration as if weighing her options. Then comes Candela, who irritates Pepa by leaving a series of frantic, clearly urgent messages that the woman instantly deletes in the hopes of getting to one left by Iván. When the poor friend finally just comes to Pepa's penthouse, she relates a story of sleeping with an Arab man who turned out to be a Shiite terrorist planning a hijacking. Petrified that police will consider her an accomplice, Candela is, if anything, more suicidal than Pepa, unwilling to even alert the authorities to a possible attack in order to avoid any suspicion. Finally, Iván's son from a previous relationship, Carlos (a young Antonio Banderas with a dorky '80s haircut), comes to look at the apartment that Pepa wants to sublet, allowing the protagonist to vent her sadness to a relative of her lover's. Carlos also brings along his fiancée, Marisa, a woman with the face of a Hapsburg and a snotty, spoiled attitude to match.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown steeps its absurdities in overblown color, with every object shaded in every conceivable hue save one that looks "normal." The apartment balcony is so overwhelmingly florid that it almost resembles the oneiric balcony at the start of Hausu, where the overlit and stylized porch is so candy-colored and bright that it repels instead of allures. Almodóvar loves to toy with perfectly framed inanities, such as the mobile set of a mambo-loving taxi driver, a garish explosion of trinkets and tastelessness that wouldn't be equalled until the glittering dollhouse of a cab at the start of The Darjeeling Limited. He also includes enough close-ups of high heels to make Buñuel proud. Or horny. Or both. Other delights are innumerable, but I have a particular soft spot for the gonzo TV ad for detergent framed as a mother cleaning the bloody clothes of her serial killer son, with detectives bursting in and standing back, impressed, at just how well the product eradicates potential evidence. I also love the occupations of Pepa and Iván, both voiceover artists who dub American films. Almodóvar shows them overdubbing Johnny Guitar a similarly gender-bending exercise in gaudy, brilliant melodrama. Later, their talents extend to the diegetic world, the voices of the two emanating from Carlos' mouth as he reads correspondence between them.

For a film about harboring terrorists, insane women, drugging cops and grieving lovers, the stakes are low, which makes the tizzies into which everyone works themselves so much funnier. Pepa isn't the only one of Iván's jilted lovers, and he even drove Carlos' mother Lucia (Julieta Serrano) mad. She goes completely unhinged at the end, leading to an uproarious chase scene of the dragon lady riding on a motorcycle firing wildly at that damn mambo cab, a close-up of her pancaked-pale face static with liberated craziness as her hair billows behind her is one of the most hysterically terrifying shots in cinema, and windswept look when she dismounts and hunts for Iván somehow makes the situation even funnier and scarier. After being put through hell, Pepa finally realizes she's too good for Iván at her moment of triumph, a feminine victory checked by the overwhelming desire it creates in the viewer to yell, "Now you get this?!" Equally true, if just as silly, is the smaller lesson learned with the coda, where Pepa returns home and has a chat with a much more pleasant Marisa about how sometimes, a nice nap can be as refreshing as a good screw.

The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar, 2011)

[Warning—contains spoilers]

I can think of no useful way to break down Pedro Almodóvar's stunningly transgressive The Skin I Live In without using spoilers. Like Vertigo, The Skin I Live In features a twist that changes the entirety of the film's meaning, not simply on a cheap narrative level but the thematic subtext itself. Also like Vertigo, Almodóvar's film deliberately divulges its secret with an entire act to go, necessitating a discussion of that upheaval to truly unpack the film's offerings.

The Skin I Live In is a horror film in which everyone, on some level, is a monster. Some behave monstrously, while others see themselves as creatures. The only real distinction between the monsters is gender, which becomes the crux of the entire story. Almodóvar's film is remarkable for many reasons—the outlandish plot; its enticing blend of florid, rustic and aseptic color palettes; the ever-thickening atmosphere—but none more so than its ingenious, audacious, incisive commentary of gender identity.

The director wastes no time shaking up the audience. He introduces us to Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), a skilled surgeon working on "transgenesis," experimenting on human DNA to improve the species. In his house he keeps a woman, Vera (Elena Anaya), whom he locks in an upstairs room and denies her any sharp objects. Clad in a flesh-toned body stocking, Vera looks like an animated medical textbook drawing, anatomically correct but blank. Her presence disturbs the tranquility of Ledgard's villa, an offsetting feeling only exacerbated by the surgery clinic the doctor built on the grounds that resembles the secret lab of a mad scientist (which it is). These touches disrupt the film before it has truly begun, and things only get worse from here.

We learn that Ledgard, inspired by the suicide of his wife after a car accident left her horribly scarred, is trying to create a form of human skin resistant to burns. He tests this new flesh on Vera, and Almodóvar stresses her guinea-pig state with a beautiful, dreamy, but horrific fade from a headless medical dummy with lines marked for patches of skin to Vera lying in the same chair with the same lines marked on her. Almodóvar, along with cinematographer José Louis Alcaine, never oversells the sadism of these scenes, instead creating a lush but eerie feeling that fits with the melodramatic flourishes of revenge that slowly filter into the film, matching two dissimilar patterns along the same beat.

That oneiric approach informs even the twist, revealed through a flashback clearly rooted in Vera's perspective. While she sleeps, we see in her dreams not the woman but a young man, Vicente, a cocksure, self-consciously masculine boy who preens like a '50s greaser. Perhaps compensating for working as a seamster in his mother's shop, he hits on the lesbian clerk and later rides out to a wedding clearly looking to pick up a girl. He succeeds, chatting up Ledgard's daughter and taking her out to the garden to get some action. But his aggressive come-ons go too far, and the already shaken Norma goes completely insane and eventually kills herself. Ledgard, now wholly insane, kidnaps the boy and, as we see through a series of surgeries, turns him into Vera.

Does the reveal truly count as a twist, though? In a narrative sense, absolutely; it reconfigures the character dynamics and plunges the film into even darker territory. But it's hardly a twist the way we think of it, with a sudden reveal calculated to send the audience reeling. Anyone paying attention will put together the truth a few minutes into the extended flashback, but that in no way spoils the mood. The truth underneath The Skin I Live In is shocking, but Almodóvar does not simply drop it on the audience, instead elongating the jolt into the same sustained, sinking feeling that permeates the whole film. Almodóvar, having refined his flourishes over the years, is one of the few people who can cross as many boundaries as he does while still displaying a clear amount of restraint.

Furthermore, by not staging this as a quick reveal, Almodóvar gives the audience time to rethink the entire film to that point and what follows, which allows for a deep consideration of gender politics. We've already seen how gender affects the type of monstrosity shown in this film: Ledgard cages Vera, watches her on surveillance monitors, and has his way with her when he pleases. Contrast that active villainy to the wife, whom we see post-accident in flashback. Scarred beyond all recognition, she recoils when she finally sees her reflection and cannot bear to live. Where Ledgard hides his monstrosity beneath a handsome and soft-spoken veneer, the wife sees herself as a hideous beast.

Vicente/Vera bridges the split and clarifies the commentary. Vicente, though not evil, is brash, arrogant, defiant and sexually aggressive. He feels remorse for going too far with Norma, but he also thinks he can just move on with his life. Vera, however, is submissive, not only to Ledgard but Zeca, the half-brother who ran off with Ledgard's wife. Zeca returns and, mistaking Vera for the wife, proceeds to break into her room and rape her. After a time, Vera even defends Ledgard when suspicions begin to mount. His real face now obscured through surgery, Vicente internalizes his new feminine state and acquiesces to that gender role. It's worth noting that most of what aggression Vera still exhibits is self-directed in the same way that the wife and Norma take out their agonies on themselves where Zeca and Ledgard brutalize others.

Through Vicente/Vera, Almodóvar makes plain that gender is merely a social construct. The degree to which Vicente accepts the submissive role of the female is stunning, and it starts from the moment Ledgard gives him a vaginoplasty. Marilla, Ledgard's servant, functions as the steely matron, complicit in Ledgard's atrocities. But when she comes to the villa in flashback to look after Vera, we see her elect to wear a servant's uniform, willingly stepping back into her role as caregiver, and she even sacrifices her son in the present to maintain order for the child who grew up to be her master. As men, Ledgard, Zeca and Vicente are bestial, indulging their appetites without a care in the world. But it is the women who are made into creatures, be it Vera's lab rat, Marilla's beast of burden or the wife's hideous alien. To further stress the role gender plays in the characters' behavior, Almodóvar sparks the violence of the falling action from a glimpse Vera gets of her old self in the paper, triggering a last vestige of masculine self-determination that breaks the spell of submission.

This elevates The Skin I Live In from a first-rate genre mash-up to one of the most daring films in recent years. Almodóvar doesn't chuck in transgender forms for the sake of shock but to examine the ways that the binary opposition functions and enslaves us. This explains the stylistic intermingling feminine melodrama and masculine horror-thriller, and why neither style offers a respite. In this film, color—the passionately red blood, the offensively bright yellow of Zeca's Carnival costume/disguise—signals trouble as much as the sterility of Ledgard's lab or the ascetic conditions of Vera's sparsely decorated room.

Faces play a key role in The Skin I Live In, with Almodóvar routinely placing a male face in front of a surveillance monitor of Vera. Sometimes the man looks down upon a tiny screen, other times Vera's face looms over the watcher on a giant TV. In both cases, some force pulls each face toward the other, enticing the male, bracing the female for what she knows is coming. Almodóvar's films routinely delve into feminine oppression, and not always by evil men (Vicente has that same perverted innocence to him as Benigno from Talk to Her), but The Skin I Live In explicitly deals with the gender split and its primal, horrifying impulses better not only than any of his own movies but any film that comes to mind. Brilliantly paced and thematized, The Skin I Live In is the probably the most unorthodox, most entertaining distillation of feminist theory ever made by a man.