At Home With… February Picks

SAVANNAH BRADLEY selects
The Last Seduction

The Last Seduction, dir. John Dahl, 1994

Pauline Kael once described Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), a blanched, libidinal Daphne du Maurier adaptation, as “splintered and sensualized, like fear and death.” The Last Seduction is borne of that same dichotomy. After stealing her husband’s drug money, vampy telemarketer (Linda Fiorentino) hides out upstate, finding a new man and a new scheme to bide her time. The film’s brilliance lies in Dahl’s ability to position sex as perfunctory as death and death as torrid as sex. Shots are taken at hip level; murder is spoken of coolly, coquettishly; intercourse is half-robotic, with Bridget, in one of the film’s most famous scenes, forcefully screwing her lover against a chain-link fence. What sets Dahl’s work apart from other erotic thrillers of the era is Fiorentino’s staggering performance: Bridget is a clever, archly professional, impenitent sociopath, with no secret tragedy or tribulation revealed to make us forgive her. She is evil because she can be, and there is a certain pleasure in watching that evil take shape. The Last Seduction is a neo-noir not about uncovering the sinister, nor reveling in it, but using it as a kind of putty. How delicious when her lover says, “I’m trying to figure out whether you’re a total fucking bitch or not,” and Bridget responds in total surety: “I am a total fucking bitch.”

WATCH THE LAST SEDUCTION

Savannah Eden Bradley is a writer and fashion editor from North Carolina. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the fashion magazine HALOSCOPE. Her first book, Ladies of the Canyon, is forthcoming from University of Texas Press. You can stalk her everywhere online @savbrads.

MARC J. PALM selects
Even Dwarfs Started Small

Even Dwarfs Started Small, dir. Werner Herzog, 1970

A hysterical fever dream, ripe with analogies. Chaos ensues: things, animals, and people are smashed, crushed, killed, whacked, set on fire, abused, and messed with in assorted ways. Power vs. vulnerability on scales both micro and macro. There’s a surreal level of absurdity, and one cannot help but laugh along with these people, free from their imprisoner and expectations. They seem to be having the time of their lives. There’s so much laughter (maniacal for the most part) and what appears many times to be pure joy. More than I think I’ve ever seen in a Herzog film. 

WATCH EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL

Marc J. Palm is a MAD Magazine contributor and self-publisher with an Eisner Award nomination for illustration/cartooning. He happily slings DCPs and popcorn at the Beacon Cinema in Seattle.

YUKA MURAKAMI selects
Fata Morgana

Fata Morgana, dir. Werner Herzog, 1971

Widely regarded as idiosyncratically apart from the nonfiction oeuvre of Herzog’s filmography, Fata Morgana is a mesmerizing, photographic foray into the Sahara, marked by an insistent making of a mirage. Its visual commitment together with Lotte Eisner’s narration of the Mayan creation text, Popol Vuh, summons a reckoning with the primordial that descends into moments of dystopia, oddity, and charm. Transfixing, existential, austere, and defeating, the film sustains the inherent qualities of a myth in relating this telluric survey, full of ambivalence and contradiction.

WATCH FATA MORGANA

Yuka Murakami is a filmmaker and writer based in New York. She works in the programming department at Metrograph.