You can figure out a lot about the differences between our culture and French culture by comparing two current series of low-budget TV features about teenagers. The French series, “Tous les garcons et les filles de leur age” (“All the Boys and Girls of Their Age”), produced by the French “cultural” channel Arte, has yielded half a dozen features, most of them first-rate. The idea is for the filmmaker to make a fictionalized version of his or her own teenage years set in the appropriate period (different in each film) and to include at least one party scene in which pop songs of that era are used. (The series is financed in part by Polygram, which has furnished the appropriate recordings.) The first of these, Patricia Mazuy’s Travolta and Me, showed at last year’s Chicago International Film Festival; four others were programmed at the festival last month–Olivier Assayas’ Cold Water, Andre Techine’s Wild Reeds, Cedric Kahn’s Too Much Happiness, and Chantal Akerman’s Portrait of a Young Girl From Brussels–but unfortunately the first and best of these was canceled at the last minute. One more, Claire Denis’ Boom Boom, has also been completed.
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One obvious difference between the two series is that the French films are semiautobiographical reflections while the American films are spin-offs of previous genre product. The French films are introverted, the American extroverted: the French directors were invited to think about their own lives, while the Americans had to start with schlocky movies virtually defined by their tossed-off, ephemeral quality. Not surprisingly, given the special feeling in the French cinema for adolescence, that series has already yielded rather spectacular results, including the best work I’ve seen by Assayas and Techine (though regrettably these are not the sort of pictures American distributors have shown any interest in picking up). The American series, on the other hand, is at best a collection of offbeat so-called B-films, though given the state of American movies at the moment this is a much more sizable achievement than it might at first appear–especially considering that the whole system that once supported B-films no longer exists.
Indeed, from one point of view the term “B-film” as it’s currently used is as much a misnomer as “sneak preview”–another term that refers misleadingly to a practice that no longer exists. (A “sneak preview” originally meant a preview of an upcoming feature whose title was unannounced, shown on a double bill with a current feature in order to poll audience reactions. Current previews, however, advertise their titles and are generally meant to foster “advance buzz” or word of mouth. The only thing sneaky about them is the misleading use of the term “sneak.”)
Characteristically, a loose sense of genre–in this case, film noir–in The Last Seduction is supposed to justify attitudes that otherwise might not be ideologically palatable. About once a year, it seems, a movie featuring a ferociously evil and malicious bitch (or witch) is a huge hit with audiences, critics, or both, and each time it happens–as in Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, or Dahl’s Last Seduction–some version of noir styling helps make this demonology acceptable; often such styling even takes the place of character motivation. In effect, this idea has been imposed on the past in order to excuse the present: during the heyday of noir in the 40s and 50s, when bitch heroines were a dime a dozen, nobody in this country used or needed or even thought of the term “noir” to justify them, but today the term is used as a form of retroactive validation. (Another form of validation is calling these recent films “feminist” because they portray “strong women”–an argument that’s usually put forward by men and that generally ignores how patriarchal the movie’s underpinnings are.)
This is a rare lapse for Dante. But the illusion of being back in the 50s or in a 50s movie is never established to begin with in Girls in Prison, Shake, Rattle and Rock!, and Dragstrip Girl. What one gets instead are attitudes and ideas about the 50s–passionately engaged in the first two, conventional and rather dull in the third. Part of the problem is the tone struck in the scripts; because the filmmakers feel compelled to make up for the fact that people never swore or made racist remarks or took off their clothes in the originals, they usually lay these things on with a trowel here, and the characters wind up coming across as 90s archetypes in 90s movies.
At certain moments and in its own way, Allan Arkush’s Shake, Rattle and Rock!, whose script is credited to someone named Trish Soodik, is equally frenetic, and its plot is every bit as politically committed. Of the four, this is the one that’s most attentive to black characters, routinely omitted in the original AIP quickies even when they would have had an immediate bearing on the story (as they do here). I was won over by the credit sequence, which shows rock-and-roll heroine Susan (Renee Zellweger) lip-synching Little Richard’s “The Girl Can’t Help It” while cavorting madly around her fluffy 50s bedroom, shot in a slurred, pixilated form that recalls the exuberant camera style of Wong Kar-wei (Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express). The movie charts the pitched battle between intolerant, racist antirock adults, led by a rabid ringleader (Mary Woronov) and including Susan’s mother (Nora Dunn), and Susan and her rock allies: Danny (Howie Mandel), who hosts an American Bandstand-style TV show; Cookie (Patricia Childress), Susan’s saxophone-playing best friend; a black female vocal quartet headed by Sireena (Latanyia Baldwin); and a drummer who provides them with a former Chinese restaurant to perform in.
