He didn’t know she was married. Other things divide them, including their different tastes in music. He performs the classics, but one day plays rhythmic African rhythms for her. She smiles gratefully, in a reaction shot of such startling falseness that the editor should never have permitted it. Later Shandurai has a speech where she says how brave, how courageous, her husband is. Eventually we gather that Mr. Kinsky is selling his possessions to finance the legal defense of the husband. Even the piano goes.
All of this time the film has been performing a subtle striptease involving Shandurai, who has been seen in various stages of partial or suggested nudity. Now, at the end, we see her breasts as she lies alone in bed. I mention this because it is so transparently a payoff; Godard said the history of cinema is the history of boys photographing girls, and Bertolucci’s recent films (like Stealing Beauty) underline that insight.
I am human. I am pleased to see Thandie Newton nude. In a film of no pretension, nudity would not even require any justification; beauty is beauty, as Keats did not quite say. But in Besieged we have troublesome buried issues. This woman is married to a brave freedom fighter. She says she loves and admires him. Now, because Mr. Kinsky has sold his piano to free her husband, she gets drunk and writes several drafts of a note before settling on one (“Mr. Kinsky, I love you”). She caresses herself and then steals upstairs and slips into his bed. In the morning, her freed husband stands outside the door of the flat, ringing the bell again and again—ignored.
If a moral scale is at work here, who has done the better thing: A man who went to prison to protest an evil government, or a man who freed him by selling his piano? How can a woman betray the husband she loves and admires, and choose a man with whom she has had no meaningful communication?
To be fair, some feel the ending is open. I felt the husband’s ring has gone unanswered. Some believe the ending leaves him in uncertain limbo. If this story had been by a writer with greater irony or insight, I can imagine a more shattering ending, in which Mr. Kinsky makes all of his sacrifices, and Shandurai leaves exactly the same note on his pillow—but is not there in the morning.
The film’s need to have Shandurai choose Mr. Kinsky over her husband, which is what I think she does, is rotten at its heart. It turns the African man into a plot pawn, it robs him of his weight in the mind of his wife, and then leaves him standing in the street. Besieged is about an attractive young black woman choosing a white oddball over the brave husband she says she loves. What can her motive possibly be? I suggest the character is motivated primarily by the fact that the filmmakers are white.
The Beyond
(Directed by Lucio Fulci; starring Catriona MacColl, Giovanni De Nava; 1981)
The Beyond not only used to have another title, but its director used to have another name. First released in 1981 as Seven Doors of Death, directed by Louis Fuller, it now returns in an “uncut original version” as The Beyond, directed by Lucio Fulci.
Fulci, who died in 1996, was sort of an Italian Hershell Gordon Lewis. Neither name may mean much to you, but both are pronounced reverently wherever fans of zero-budget schlock horror films gather. Lewis was the Chicago-based director of such titles as Two Thousand Maniacs, She-Devils on Wheels, and The Gore-Gore Girls. Fulci made Zombie and Don’t Torture the Duckling. Maybe that was a temporary title, too.
The Beyond opens in “Louisiana 1927,” and has certain shots obviously filmed in New Orleans, but other locations are possibly Italian, as was (probably) the sign painter who created the big DO NOT ENTRY sign for a hospital scene. It’s the kind of movie that alternates stupefyingly lame dialogue with special-effects scenes in which quicklime dissolves corpses and tarantulas eat lips and eyeballs.
The plot involves . . . excuse me for a moment, while I laugh uncontrollably at having written the words “the plot involves.” I’m back. The plot involves a mysterious painter in an upstairs room of a gloomy, Gothic Louisiana hotel. One night carloads and boatloads of torch-bearing vigilantes converge on the hotel and kill the painter while shouting, “You ungodly warlock!” Then they pour lots of quicklime on him, and we see a badly made model of his body dissolving.
Time passes. A woman named Liza (played by Catriona MacColl, who was named “Catherine” when the director was named “Louis”), inherits the hotel, which needs a lot of work. Little does she suspect it is built over one of the Seven Doors of Evil that lead to hell. She hires a painter, who falls from a high scaffold and shouts “The eyes! The eyes!” Liza’s friend screams, “This man needs to get to a hospital!” Then there are ominous questions, like “How can you fall from a four-foot-wide scaffold?” Of course, one might reply, one can fall from anywhere, but why did he have a four-foot-wide scaffold?
Next Liza calls up Joe the Plumber (Giovanni de Nava), who plunges into the flooded basement, wades into the gloom, pounds away at a wall, and is grabbed by a horrible thing in the wall, which I believe is the quicklimed painter, although after fifty years it is hard to make a firm ID.
Let’s see. Then there is a blind woman in the middle of a highway with a seeing-eye dog, which later attacks her (I believe this is the same woman who was in the hotel in 1927), and a scene in a morgue, where the wife of one of the victims (the house painter, I think, or maybe Joe) sobbingly dresses the corpse (in evening dress) before being attacked by acid from a self-spilling jar on a shelf.
But my favorite scene involves the quicklimed decomposed corpse, which is now seen in a hospital next to an oscilloscope that flatlines, indicating death. Yes, the rotting cadaver is indeed dead—but why attach it, at this late date, to an oscilloscope? Could it be because we’ll get a shot in which the scope screen suddenly indicates signs of life? I cannot lie to you. I live for moments like that.
Fulci was known for his gory special effects (the Boston critic Gerald Peary, who has seen several of his films, cites one in which a woman vomits up her intestines), and The Beyond does not disappoint. I have already mentioned the scene where the tarantulas eat eyeballs and lips. As the tarantulas tear away each morsel, we can clearly see the strands of latex and glue holding it to the model of a corpse’s head. Strictly speaking, it is a scene of tarantulas eating makeup.
In a film filled with bad dialogue, it is hard to choose the most quotable line, but I think it may occur in Liza’s conversations with Martin, the architect hired to renovate the hotel. “You have carte blanche,” she tells him, “but not a blank check!”
The movie is being revived around the country for midnight cult shows. Midnight is not late enough.
Beyond and Back
(Directed by James L. Conway; starring Brad Crandall; 1978)
The makers of Beyond and Back were also responsible, if memory serves, for another film called In Search of Noah’s Ark. It figures. At the end of that one they were still searching for Noah’s Ark—they never found it. At the end of Beyond and Back we’re back, all right—but were we beyond?
The movie’s another one of those pseudo-scientific laundry lists of half-baked psychic theories. There may be something to the theories, all right, but there’s never anything to the movies. They’re booked into half the theaters in town and promoted with a hard-sell TV campaign, on the theory that enough suckers will be parted from their money before the word gets out that it’s a turkey.