Saturday, November 10, 2018

Suspiria 2018




spoiler alerts

          A nearly 3 hour somewhat boring mess. Listen if you are a fan of the original 1977 Dario Argento film, you should probably do yourself a favor and skip this dud. The problems with it are as high and long as the Berlin wall that hovers over the film, one of many obvious symbolic touches that the director Luca Guadagnino thought was needed. The story has some similarities to the original and is set in a rain drenched gray and ugly Berlin circa 1977, oh gee that’s the year the original film was released. Another wink wink.
               A young American girl has come to West Berlin to study at a famous dance academy   run by the tall, lanky and scary looking Tilda Swindon who by the way has more than one part which I won’t give away. The student is played by Dakota Johnson and if someone could please explain why this talentless thing is making money and movies I would greatly appreciate it.  Yes I know who her parents are, but still. Dakota with her bright red hair and vacant look appears unannounced and is soon swept up in Swindon’s Madame Blanc’s bony arms as the best thing to come down the dance pike since Martha Graham whose fingerprints are all over the place.
               The all female student body acts strange almost as strange as the frumpy and grumpy all female teaching staff do and I won’t even mention the rampant lesbianism that’s all the rage here. All sorts of weird things start to happen including the dreadful dance routines (the final dance recital is so bad I thought I heard Mark Morris howling down the block from the Bam Rose Theatre where he has his own dance theatre). Guadagnio who made a couple of films that I liked quite a bit, “I Am Love” and “Call Me By Your Name” loads the film up with symbols, hints and color coded mayhem to help us understand what is going on, a good script would have been a better idea.
                There are flashbacks to Dakota’s abusive (so it seems) childhood and mother where she grew up in a unloved Mennonite childhood somewhere in Ohio that make no sense, and all they do is stretch out this unending film. There are also dollops  of political events of the time including the Baeder-Mein Hoff terrorist attacks and hostage killings along with far left protests happening it seems at every moment in these rainy snowy days of winter. He also throws in unwelcomed references to the Holocaust.
            There are a few scares all without much sense and gussied up in the latest digital effects tricks and treats with gore and guts galore and all awash in handsome cinematography. The Argento version was sharper faster and much more fun and really scared me in half the running time.  Argento who when he was good was great had a great feel for making spaces sinister whether they be creepy schools or empty de Chirico  like plazas at night, another talent that Guadagnino is lacking.  Especially important to the peril and threats I felt with the Argento version was because of the much better cast that included the wonderful Jessica Harper who in this version makes a welcomed cameo and as the creepy head of the school and main threats we had Joan Bennett and the great Alida Valli. What they had that these new actors don’t is a sense of mystery, we didn’t really know what they were up to and hey it was Joan Bennett after all who brought years of wonderful performances with her.  In this version we know immediately that these ladies are up to no good. There are some fun moments in this version thanks to some New Wave German vets. Like  Angela Winkler and Ingrid Caven but they are far and few between.  Lets hope that a Broadway musical is not planned. One of the worst films of 2018.       

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