All apologies to the New Colony Six for the title.
Who knew that Dario Argentio's
Mother of Tears, the third and possibly last installment of his "Mothers" series, would be such a stumbling block for me? This is the second effort I'm making at this review.
The first attempt, not so cleverly framed as a phone conversation betwixt myself and the director, was posted yesterday. It was up for about five minutes when my wife, host of a very successful literary news and book industry blog, told me that I should really take it down. She said it was too nasty and bitter and was more an "I'm an angry jackass" piece than a review proper. She was right. The Interwebs has got enough "I'm an angry jackass" pieces to last us all several lifetimes, so I took it down.
For those who clicked over from yesterday's link on the League of Tana Tea Drinker's aggregator site, my apologies. For you, I present the only salvageable section of the seven-page rant:
CRwM: . . . You even work in a few in-jokes for the hardcore fans. That's nice of you.
DA: The monkey.
CRwM: Yeah. The monkey.
DA: Well you saw what they said about the monkey. How can people hate on a monkey? Monkey equals rad.
CRwM: That's why the UN-recognized standard global unit of fun is the barrel of monkeys.
DA: That's the very point of monkeys! Who doesn't want a monkey in their movie? Nobody, that's who.
CRwM: People are weird.Weird indeed.
Today we do take two . . . and action.
Being aware of the critical/fan reaction to
Mother of Tears before sitting down to watch the film myself, my initial reaction was, oddly enough, pity. I actually felt bad for Dario Argento.
For years, Argento's been flogging the dead horse of his shtick. He's made a name for himself creating flicks with nonsensical, elliptical plots. He's really good at this and he's managed to avoid either "cause" or its dutiful handmaiden, "effect," for many years. He's peopled his flicks with wooden, semi-disposable actors and actresses who don't act in these films so much as get they get stage-managed. Even when Argento had a future Academy Award nominee on cast, he managed to level them down to the status of prop. Stylistically, his rep rested mainly on three things: absurdly and unintentionally comical POV shots, washing scenes in colored lights so heavy-handedly that it looks like his shots were composed in crayon, and an enduring commitment to graphic violence.
In any other genre, this impressive list of creative limitations would have prevented him from becoming even so much as a dead link on some other director's IMDB page. But this is horror. Aside from the sizeable cult of tastemakers whose primary aesthetic interest seems to be the promotion of crap that one is supposed to enjoy ironically - the so-bad-it's-good-set that keeps the rotting corpse of exploitation cinema dancing around like a shopworn marionette - there's a strong sense across the community that any regrettable lack of skill, repeated often enough and earnestly enough, becomes traditional. Aside from one or two genre classics, most of what he's cranked out over the past three decades is notable for its stubborn adherence to his "style," constituting the aesthetic equivalent of a remarkably prolonged adolescence.
Despite the monotony of this output and the inevitable onset of diminishing returns, most of his fans never left him. Although their defense of his work came to sound more and more like the sort of intentionally-missing-the-point-complements one makes regarding the athletic performance of physically retarded children. A few die-hards even go so far as to suggest that Argento's actually "too good" for all those basic filmmaking skills he seems to lack.
That makes the reception of
MoT cruelly ironic. Argento finally produces a pic that begins to meet some reasonable minimal expectation of quality. It has a plot that is built out a logical chain of interlinked occurrences, it's built it around the performance of a two-time David de Donatello Best Actress Award Winner, and it subtly integrates he's signature stylistic flourishes in such a away that they work with the film rather than feeling like a like a suffocating layer of slick but irrelevant armor. He nods to his previous films and pulls from the newest on-going source of inspiration, high art from the Renaissance and early Enlightenment.
So, after actually showing some glimmer of artistic development, Argento's fans ditch him. They more than just ditch him: They showed up in droves to absolutely shit all over your work. It's like some horror-geek version of DSP. People frame the film in terms of a personal betrayal. Some who normally champion any cut rate schlock-shocker so long as its got subtitles turned around and suggest that they actually have never liked him. And, in the classiest display of critical insight since film critics made easy copy out of Sophia Coppola's nose in
Godfather III, several bloggers and horror site hosts have taken the opportunity to suggest that star and directorial off-spring Asia Argento is ugly.
Let's talk specifics about the flick. A follow-up to your earlier
Susperia (one of the previously mentioned genre classics) and
Inferno (a moronic mess that even Argento glosses over in this flick),
Mother of Tears involves the release of the third of a trio of witches – the Mother of Tears – in Rome. The MoT is, as several characters inform the viewer, the most beautiful and cruel of the three witches. I don't know about relative cruelty levels, but the beauty thing isn't hard to cinch: the first mother took beauty tips from Norman Bates's mom and the second turned out to be a Grim Reaperish figure just slightly less scary, or believable, than an off-the-rack Target Halloween outfit.
The MoT's evil is contagious and a sort of plague of moral malaise spreads through the Europe. Random citizens are committing violent acts while others calmly go about their day, only vaguely interested in the mounting body count and social disintegration.
Ultimately it is up to Sarah (played by Asia Argento), a staffer working in the art restoration department of a museum in Rome, to defeat this makhashaifah. Sarah, it turns out, is descended from a long line of "good witches." Wicca, like the Force, has binary good/bad aspects. Sarah, the last of her kind, must find the lair of the MoT and destroy her before she can usher in a Second Age of Witches, which would probably be pretty awesome if you were an evil witch but would must assuredly suck for everybody else.
Curiously, for all its dependence on supernatural elements, this is the most narratively cohesive of all Argento's works. Though it belongs in same fairy tale/quest story category as your 1985 flick
Phenomenon (the other genre classic I was thinking of earlier), it's logic is considerably less willy-nilly. Sure, there's some inexplicable magic shenanigans afoot – as one might well have with witches running about – but for the most part the story is linear and comprehensible. Compare the random acts of violence committed in
MoT, which are explicable in light of the Mother's viral malevolence, with the random attack by the meat wagon dude in
Inferno who, for no reason, chops up one of the film's characters. The latter is vintage Argento, the former represents a newfound respect for something we call "sense."
Even Argento's famed obsession with color-coding his scenes seems less slapdash here. Previously, he was overdoing the lighting, as if he was afraid his audience was to dim to get it. He's still color-coding everything – which is cool if that's his bag; he's the director. But now he does the same thing through costuming, set design, and prop selection. Instead of feeling like an invasive add-on, the visual schemes seem of a piece with the film. For example, instead of just washing the catacombs of the Mother's lair in red light, he lets blood, red clay mud, and brick colored tunics do much of work. It doesn't feel so desperately stylish, like an amateur's idea of advanced techniques.
Even the supernatural touches feel multivalent and woven into the story. The much-maligned monkey familiar of the Mother of Tears is a good example. Riffing off the Renaissance art he surrounded Sarah with (not to mention the "see no evil/hear no evil/speak no evil" idols that usher in the MoT's reign of terror) he makes the familiar a monkey: a common symbol in of human irrationality, sin, and the Satanic impulse to impersonate beings of greater stature in Renaissance painting. It also let's Argento send the MoT around, via familiar, while keeping her off-stage as long as possible. Finally, it's a nice little wink and nod to the other great female quest story he's done:
Phenomenon.
Even the jump-scares show how a commitment to detail. Though folks have pretty much dismissed the flick's one jump-scare as cheap throwaway gag and a sign of Argento's dwindling prowess, careful viewers can see that the screaming demon figure that scares the poop out of Sarah in her dream is, in fact, the killer sneaking into the house. The whole point of the scene was to demonstrate, through a premonition, that Sarah's witchpoo powers were manifesting in increasingly powerful ways.
These dismissals are, to a degree, Argento's own fault. For years, he was lazy about the logic and rigor of his flicks. He made mysteries that couldn't really be solved by considering the evidence. He never bothered to connect dots or explain anything – or, more honestly, make things that could be explained. He trained his fans to not think to hard about his films. Now that he's making links and connections, what are fans supposed to do?
Besides, there are some real bad choices in there. The character of the spirit mother that acts as Sarah's ghostly Obi-Wan is given so little to do that she becomes more annoying than dramatic. The centuries-old tunic that the Mother of Tears wears looks like it was made with a Bedazzler and the members of the global coven look like extras from an Adam Ant Halloween special.
Still, compared to some of the crap Argento has let stand in your older films, those are strictly small potatoes.
In the final analysis,
Mother of Tears is better than many of the films he's made. And while it falls short of
Susperia, it isn't even the worst of this particular trilogy: that would be
Inferno.
More importantly than all of that, Asia Argento is still awesome. Admittedly, she's a bit miscast here. She needs roles that aren't to white bread, but the argument that she's somehow lost the ability to command the screen or has lost her looks strike me as bizarre.
Asia Argento was never beautiful in any conventional way. She looks like that chick nobody remembers inviting to the party, the one the boys want to hang out with, but who has no use for all other the chicks in the room. She looks and moves like a boyfriend stealer – but worse, the kind of girl who steals a woman's man and leaves the poor alteh moid wondering what in world this scruffy, uncouth, outsider, tramp has that she doesn't.
Well. What to do? Should Argento go back to making half-assed reworkings of the same handful of flicks his fan base likes?
Personally, I think he should do non-horror. He should adapt Lucarelli's "De Luca" trilogy or do Carlotto's
The Goodbye Kiss. Fast moving crime stuff. He'd get to use his strengths but it would help him shed the luggage of his own mediocre mid- to late- period stuff and help him scrape off the fans who insist that he exist as a museum piece.
Scene's from the Legoland's zombie holocaust. Found on /Film by way of Dave at Digital Download.
