SITGES 2011: Critic's Notebook
by Steve Dollar 
Experienced as an American visitor, at least, an annual autumn visit to the
Sitges Film Festival offers pleasures you really don't find anywhere else. Also known by the more cumbersome official name of Festival Internacional de Cinema Fant�stic de Catalunya, the 11-day genre marathon sprawls across the resort town on the Balearic Sea. It's not simply convened in a particular focal point?the 1,200-seat auditorium housed inside a onetime 1992 Olympics compound that is now the Hotel Melia?but takes over the entire town: from the nude beaches to the old cathedral to the narrow, winding streets where a pair of vintage moviehouses also offer screenings, including all-night themed programs. Magically, it seems, you can stumble out of, say,
Karate-Robo Zaborgar at 3 a.m. and still find a slew of rowdies consorting at a dockside, open-air bar. Maybe after a few whiskeys, including the one you spilled on local hero and karaoke assassin
Nacho Vigalondo, or one of the ubiquitous models from Cinemax's Femme Fatales (who curiously moved in a pack to every social event here for nights on end), you'd remember an 8:30 a.m. press screening that couldn't be missed and begin the long climb back to the hotel. But first to conquer the 100 Steps of Death, more dreaded?to a blind drunk festival maven at 5 a.m.?than any zombie hayride, up, up, up the hillside stairway to the hotel, where breathlessly you can collapse into jet-lagged dreams of chainsaws and colliding planets and naked killer cyborg babes.
The relatively exotic locale, which for 44 years has hosted the world's first and foremost fantastic fest, lends panoramic splendor to even the most depraved acts of cinematic provocation. And in that spirit, a film like
The Woman is granted the same esteem as potential Oscar bait like
The Artist. Indeed, a movie about an avenging cannibal wolf-girl slave is probably given more regard, because in this milieu an avenging cannibal wolf-girl slave isn't just a genre archetype, it's the whole enchilada, the habanero sauce, and the mouth that consumes it. Oklahoma indie filmmaker
Lucky McKee's collaboration with New York cult novelist
Jack Ketchum, a covert sequel to the 2009
Offspring, is the perfect film to see in Sitges. Maybe it's superficial to blame it on an indelible cultural imprint made by The Inquisition or some DNA-level ancient Moorish hoodoo, but Spanish audiences really relate to the visceral. They do so in a way that makes the exultant, blood-thirsty vibe of the old 42nd Street grindhouses or the drive-ins of the deep South not a relic of the cinemaniacal past but something like a soul-possessing demon that has, at last, found an abiding host to inhabit.
The funny thing about
The Woman is that it's much more a twisted satire of suburban normalcy than a gut-ripping gorefest?although, eventually, it is that, too. The exquisite slow burn begins with a jaw-dropping proposition. Country lawyer, well-to-do paterfamilias and George W. Bush lookalike Chris Cleek (
Sean Bridgers) spies the feral title creature (Scottish model Pollyanna McIntosh) in a nearby forest while on a hunting jaunt, and decides to bag the most dangerous game. Subdued and then chained up in the family storm cellar, the Woman is part sideshow freak, part social conditioning experiment. The smug, matter-of-fact Cleek, a parody of 1950s-style manhood that might have been drawn by
John Waters or
Daniel Clowes, brings the whole family in on the project as if they were constructing a Go Kart rather than breaking a captive human. There's the horny, sadist-in-training son Brian (Zach Reed), long-suffering wife Belle (
Angela Bettis), youngest daughter Darlin' (Shyla Molhusen), and deeply troubled adolescent daughter Peggy (Lauren Ashley Carter), whose antisocial behavior hints at something very dark and wrong in the uneasily spotless and orderly Cleek household.
The Woman's reaction is rage, and then submission?she first bites off the tip of Cleek's finger after he's got her in chains?as she becomes a focal point for each family members' desires and anxieties, and the script's outrageous slow burn lets the suspense build as we wait, patiently, for all shit to break loose. The seething hatred in McIntosh's laser-like eyes, sunk low in their sockets like a wraith from a J-Horror flick, is all the telegram required on that front. Washed down and spruced up, she reminds Cleek of "a polygamist wife." Soon enough, he's sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night to rape her while his son watches through a peephole.
The sensational aspects of the film jostle between the musky transgression of short fiction from some vintage men's magazine (Ketchum honed his skills writing for the likes of
Cavalier and
Oui, in the days when scrapping authors could actually make a living concocting such lurid misadventures) and straight-up BDSM porn you can find on the Internet for $40 a month. The use of chewy strip-club rock anthems and a camera given to reckless eyeballing of the juicy bits is ironic enough to frame it all as tongue-in-cheek, although apparently the images have been enough to provoke cries of disgust on YouTube. But it ain't no thing for a woman who runs with the wolves. As the story veers into
I Spit on Your Grave payback time, the face-eating, sinew-snapping, blood-drinking party is zestfully brutal, with a sweet, cuddly coda that suggests primitive flesheaters are just as family-oriented as anyone else.
The feminist theme may lack a subtext you can take too seriously, as if anyone is inclined to, but it's a lot more convincing than
Sleeping Beauty. Australian novelist Julia Leigh's debut feature, to which Ozzie auteur
Jane Campion has lent her name, is at least as much an exploitation flick. Much discussed on the web following its Cannes premiere this spring, the chilly post-feminist fable has a mostly naked
Emily Browning as Lucy, a collegiate sylph whose odd-job roulette and sexual promiscuity lead her into the employ of the world's strangest brothel?much more unusual than the strip club/lost waifs home where she played a kinderwhore Salome in
Sucker Punch. Here, with her pale skin, pre-Raphaelite locks and perky nipples at full salute, the actress is an object of desire for wealthy elderly male clients who obsess over her unconscious form. If the movie were called
Roofied by Grandpa it wouldn't play so well as an arthouse product, as the drugged pleasure doll is unknowingly subjected to?not penetration, since that's off-limits?but all kinds of other things, icky or merely pathetic. Meanwhile, the excellent cinematography of
Geoffrey Simpson (
Shine,
Little Women) is graced by acres of wrinkly man-ass. To be sure, such a kinky mise-en-scene has its moments. An introductory scenario, as Lucy "auditions" at a very special dinner party, has the playfully decadent Euro vibe of something Helmut Newton may have lensed at a chateau, over cocaine and caviar. When the newcomer is instructed to paint her lips "the exact same color as your labia," a certain narrative suspense is, er, aroused. What's next, one wonders? Well, not much?save some sketchy observations that don't add up to anything within the film's detached, "conceptual" framework. The third act pivots on Lucy's decision to secretly videotape what happens while she sleeps, but after all the foreplay the big reveal is anticlimactic?even if Browning's sporting performance holds interest through all the pretentiousness.
Posted by ahillis at October 16, 2011 2:01 PM
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