Coming to a Theater Far Away From You: Twisted Outlaw Filmmakers

Gary Morris

The right wing is always screaming that we should "focus on the family" and encourage "family values" in our lives. Cinematically speaking, this is a prescription for disaster, if the recent "Three Twisted Films by Notorious Outlaw Filmmakers" festival is any indication.

Now boarding for family dysfunction. Alice gets lost in A Real Young Girl.

These "outlaw films" -- two of them anyway -- are in fact close-up views of families, and the picture is not a pretty one. Catherine Breillat's A Real Young Girl (Une Vraine Jeune Fille), was originally released in 1975 but caused such an uproar that it was censored then banned and remained unreleased, and rarely screened until now. Fourteen-year-old Alice (Charlotte Alexandra ) returns to her family for the summer from boarding school. Daddy lusts after her, at one point exposing himself in lurid closeup (size queens should insist on a refund), though she doesn't pay this or anything else much attention. Daddy has a philosophical bent ("All the girls give their asses and there's nothing left!") that Alice has inherited. She spends much of the film in eloquent self-analysis ("I can't accept the proximity of my face and my vagina!"), processing teenage-girl rituals like puking on herself ("I sat up, liberated by the vomit's warmth. Disgust makes me lucid."), and wandering around the house tempting one of her father's employees (Hiram Keller from Fellini Satyricon) and wearing her panties around her ankles.

Dysfunctional family values. Hey, there's that word again. Visitor Q brings the weird.

Breillat was responsible for the notorious hardcore art film Romance, and A Real Young Girl is equally challenging, with its images of Alice sticking a big spoon up her skirt and compulsively masturbating. Breillat takes a clinical, "real-time" approach to this very dicey material that subtly sucks the viewer into its depressing indictment of bourgeois life.

The other family melodrama in this series is Visitor Q (2001). While the ends are similar, director Takashi Miike's means are drastically different and probably will be more unsettling to most viewers than Breillat's. Like A Real Young Girl, Visitor Q has an incest angle. It begins with the perennial question "Have you ever done it with your dad?" A black screen opens to reveal a middle-aged man and a teenage girl having sex (Dad and daughter, we learn), the first in a series of increasingly demented tableaux.

The devil is in the lipstick, um, the details. If Satan is this woman, hello hell!

This family is one of cinema's weirdest. Dad is a TV reporter who screws not only his daughter but also the corpse of his co-anchor. Daughter is a runaway and a whore. Mom's a punching bag for their psychotic teenage son as well as a heroin addict and a prostitute. In the film's crazed pecking order, everybody's under attack by those nearest and dearest. Sonny boy is terrorized by his peers, who also assail the house nightly with fireworks. Miike gets in digs at the media, the Japanese penchant for pattern and regularity, censorship (despite the gruesome happenings, genitals are optically censored), and assorted other targets. But most of the venom here is spewed on the family.

Surprisingly, Miike pulls a number of nervous laughs out of these outré events, as when Dad gets "interviewed" by the bully boys who stick a microphone up his ass, or when he gets his dick caught in a cadaver, a dilemma dutifully addressed by Mom, who pours vinegar in the bath to unstick him. She also has one of the film's most memorable sequences when she projectile lactates for what seems like hours. This heartwarming drama, shot on digital video and aimed at the video market, is seen here in its first, and perhaps last, screening in North America, so hie thee thither.

The final outlaw in this heady trio is Doris Wishman's Satan Was a Lady, which abandons the family (mostly) in favor of a single femme fatale navigating through the seamy streets of Miami. The director is best known for her Chesty Morgan films like Deadly Weapons featuring a worn-out porn hag with 76-inch tits. Now eighty, Wishman continues to crank 'em out in digital video, and Satan is a typically sleazy effort. Whore Cleo Irane (Honey Lauren) lusts after the Good Life and blackmails an alleged businessman (who looks like he just got out of chemo). Wishman is know for her narrative discontinuities, and she devotes insanely long stretches here to maudlin "hip" crooner Ed Baines (Gly Styler), who serenades us into entropy with songs like "Come Cry with Me!"

Still, this film is surprisingly memorable with some trashily vivid scenes like Cleo in dominatrix drag angrily whipping the hell out of Mr. Businessman. Viewers unfamiliar with the Wishman oeuvre may find Satan disconcerting - what's with the crippled cat? why are those actors staring at the wall? - but like all good outlaw art, it makes up in authenticity what it lacks in sense.