Jeanne Dielman routinely prepares meals, cleans the house, mothers her teenage son, and entertains men. Then something breaks and her carefully nurtured practices slowly unravel.

“I could have made mashed potatoes, but we're having that tomorrow.”

– Jeanne Dielman

Ester Krumbachová's feminist farce is a delight of many flavours. Ona (Jiřina Bohdalová) is already 40 and in need of a man. She remembers one from her youth, the handsome, slim, and very cultured Eng. Bohouš Čerta (litt. “God the Devil, Engineer”, played by the always great Vladimír Menšík), and knows that the one way to a man's heart is through the stomach.

 

Her cooking is immaculate. So are her looks and her apartment (all created by one-time director Krumbachová who worked as a costume designer and screenwriter). Unfortunately, her beau has turned boorish and stuffs his face with all but her and the furniture (is that true?). But cooking she can, and wanting she does. So she cooks and cooks and cooks up some more.

Cabaretera, a sub-genre from the Epoca de Oro (the golden epoch of Mexican filmmaking, 1930s—1950s), combines film noir with melodrama and musical numbers. Often set in cabarets (brothels), these films talk about the plight of the prostitute who – not without their pride and dignity – are forced to being the breadwinner in a poverty-stricken community.

 

El lugar sin límites harks back to those days. We follow the plight of La Manuela, a transvestite* who together with daughter La Japonesita works as a fichera (a dancehall performer) in the brothel run by Madame La Japonesa, La Japonesita's mother.

 

The return of Pancho, a hyper-macho trucker, disrupts the family regime. The trucker's attraction to the #flamenco dancing fichera is at odds with his machismo. Him being outed as a maricón (a Mexican slur for homosexual) would be the end of his world.

 

El lugar remains a groundbreaking film, not only in how it handles taboos like #gender roles and trans- and homosexuality, but also because it highlights how (self) destructive #machismo is in Mexican society.

 

Sergio de la Mora's excellently researched EL LUGAR SIN LÍMITES: Ripstein in Review delves much deeper than this little writeup here. Do read it (spoilers ahead).

 

*Roberto Cobo's La Manuela is transsexual. The term “transvestite” is what's used in the film and typical for its time.

After her husband is gone, Alice (Ellen Burstyn) sells her stuff and the house, picks up her son Tommy (Alfred Lutter III) and embarks on fulfilling her childhood dream of becoming a singer just like Alice Faye.

Tommy: Life is short.

Alice: Yeah, well, so are you.

Quintessential Americana. Filmed in Canada.

“The sun looks ghostly when there's a mist on a river and everything's quiet. I never knowed it before.”

– Linda

Everything America stood for – God, liberty and justice for all – fell apart in the 60s. A much-loved president and family man killed on live television. Teenagers shipped to a country many never heard of before, only to end up as cannon fodder. Peace loving middleclass white kids from well-to-do families gathering en masse in Haight-Ashbury, collectively fell to bum trips and bouts of gonorrhoea. What America needs is family. Someone who takes you in, understands you, sings you songs and feeds you. An older man with friendly eyes appears on the scene, doing just that.

“These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn't teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.”

– Charles Manson, testimony

What the press dubbed The Family was a microcosm of American society; a loose collective of lost kids. Taken in by charismatic peddling pimp #CharlieManson with a steady supply of #LSD and a place to be themselves, rootless kids like Lynette “#Squeaky” Fromme and Paul Watkins were finally part of a family again. The family grew too; besides more lost souls and the occasional Beach Boy visiting Spahn Ranch, babies were born at the Devil's Slide.

 

Hendrickson and Merrick's Manson offers a candid and by times surreal portrait of a few #MansonFamily members (Squeaky makes out with a riffle, purring about how killing is like having an orgasm while Atkins lays out her plans to murder Frank Sinatra) right in the middle of the spectacle [sic] court-case. It was even nominated for an Oscar – which went to that other charismatic 70s evangelist, Marjoe (1972), while Manson was banned after Fromme's botched assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford in '75 and was lost for decades.

 

Stylistically inspired by Woodstock (1970) and soundtracked by the Family themselves, Manson remains a fascinating curio in the undying output of #Mansonsploitation movies. However gruesome, the American family is forever cemented in that holy cornerstone of self-immolation.

“We were soldiers together. A long time ago. We were young, you know? Free from everything. We've been through a lot together, we were… friends.”

In the late 1960s, Frank Serpico worked as a plainclothes cop for the #NYPD. He spoke out when he uncovered systematic, widespread #corruption within the force, but his findings were ignored. In 1970, Serpico cowrote a page 1 article for the New York Times about the problem, which led to the instalment of the Commission to Investigate Alleged Police Corruption aka the Knapp Commission.

“The reality is that we do not wash our own laundry; it just gets dirtier.”

– Frank Serpico

The following year during a drug-related arrest attempt, he was shot in the face under shady circumstances. This is where Sidney Lumet's Serpico, based on Peter Maas and Frank Serpico's book of the same name, starts.

A lot of #soccer there's not, in Wim Wenders' Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter. What we do have happens almost right at the start. After a foul, the titular goalkeeper Bloch (Arthur Brauss) is removed from the match. Frustrated he leaves and finds himself roaming the streets of #Vienna where he picks up boxoffice girl Gloria (Erika Pluhar). In the morning he kills her and travels to the countryside, waiting for the police to arrest him.

“Ich werde mich entschlossen verirren.”

– Peter Handke

Die Angst is an early, perfect example of Junger Deutscher Film (”New German Cinema”). Its cinematic thanks to Robby Müller's observant eye and Peter Handke's precise language, both describing scenes and performers as if observed through a fourth wall.

 

A very slow burning road movie, a Taxi Driver in reverse if you will, that does without the neurotic showmanship of its Hollywood counterpart.

Slobodan Ćirković aka Roko was (or is? I cannot find a lot of information online) a Serbian hypnotist capable of making people painlessly self-inflict torment. In Vlatko Gilić's short and rather disturbing Moć, Roko initiates a large group of men to thread a needle and slowly, going from him to the next to the other, connect the one thread through their bodies until all of them are stitched into one.

 

Strangely homoerotic and determinately violent, Moć feels deeply rooted in the #Serbia​n psyche. There's beauty and an unflinching élan-vital under the skin, a tenderness that comes with great, unmentionable #pain, love and death.