Anyone who wants to know all about Roger Corman, the legendary producer and director of innumerable low-budget genre-movies, and the man who gave more early-career leg-ups to eminent film-makers than anyone else, is advised to go straight to the horse’s mouth. His 1998 memoir How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, co-written with Jim Jerome, is easily one of the most entertainingly informative books ever written on cinema, chock-full of lively first-person anecdotal testimony from those who had the arduous (and notoriously ill-paid) honour of toiling for Corman during their formative years: Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Jonathan Demme, John Sayles, Ron Howard, Joe Dante and dozens more.
Perhaps inevitably, Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (his cheapies have often been categorised as “exploitation” pictures for their blatant, lucrative targeting of certain demographics) isn’t quite up to that kind of class. First-time director Alex Stapleton’s approach is rather more about functionality than flair. And while the now-octogenarian Corman enjoys ample screen-time (we see him in action on the set of his latest anti-epic, a ropey-looking made-for-television movie entitled Dinoshark), this is hagiography rather than autobiography. He may be more slave-driver than saint, but the erudite and quietly-spoken Corman – a perennial Hollywood outsider who was finally awarded a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2010 – has always exuded a mildly ecclesiastical, avuncular vibe.
This is an unflappable patrician mien decidedly at odds with the unapologetic, way-out absurdity that has characterised his output since money-spinning 1950s romp Monster from the Ocean Floor – with some notable exceptions such as Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets and Saint Jack, Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, and Corman’s own dead-serious racism exposé The Intruder (1962) which is famously the one production on which Corman actually did lose a dime or two. That picture’s star – a suavely lean, silver-tongued Canadian newcomer named William Shatner – pops up in Corman’s World as just one star in a dazzling galaxy: all of the aforementioned associates, plus more youthful rabidly admiring acolytes including Quentin Tarantino and Eli Roth.
Having succeeded in the daunting logistical task of obtaining access to such notables, Stapleton then succeeds in getting them to open up on camera – a rarity for the normally reclusive De Niro, whose contribution is brief but heartfelt. Jack Nicholson’s perpetual, beamingly shark-like mask of capo-style bonhomie, meanwhile, unexpectedly gives way as the triple Oscar-winner, whom Corman chiefly employed as a writer and re-writer on C-grade horror quickies, is uncharacteristically overcome with tearful emotion. Corman’s World may not necessarily be 2012’s most profound documentary, but in terms of providing a breezy good time at the pictures, it’ll take some beating. And, given its subject’s predilections, one can’t say fairer than that.
When asked why he had starred in so many biblical epics, smouldering 1940s Hollywood beefcake Victor Mature reckoned it was because he could “make with the holy look”. It’s a trait he shares with winsome teenage newcomer Julie Sokolowski, whose ability to exude a luminous spiritual quality in (and as) Hadewijch is the trump card of this typically ambitious and typically discombobulating new film from the provocative French writer-director Bruno Dumont.
“New” isn’t quite accurate. It premiered at the Toronto Film Festival back in September 2009 – on September 11, to be exact, an entirely appropriate date, given the picture’s focus on urban terrorism, specifically as linked to fundamentalist religion. And not just Islamic extremism: Hadewijch, a novice nun known outside the convent as Céline, is a young woman so fervent in her faith that she’s asked to leave the nunnery for a spell in the real world.
Here she chafes against the banal, opulent upper-class Parisian milieu of her diplomat father and instead befriends a pair of working-class Muslim brothers, Yassine (Yassine Salime) and Nassir (Karl Sarafidis). Nassir, whose stance is primarily pragmatic and political is a little bemused by Céline’s all-consuming devotion. Yassine, however, recognises her as a spiritual sibling and perhaps even as a potential comrade-in-arms.
Dumont’s cinema is of a self-consciously stark, po-faced austerity which can feel decidedly alien to Anglo-Saxon audiences. He clearly shares many critics’ view that, with his preference for non-professional, inexperienced performers, he’s carrying on several traditions associated with the 20th century’s poet of unremittingly low-key, thornily spiritual French cinema, Robert Bresson.
The exact meaning of the head-spinning coda here – and thus of the entire film – is a matter of opinion and debate. It involves the intercession of a crucial secondary figure, David (David Dewaele), a convict working as a caretaker in the nunnery, who, in an audacious structural ploy of Dumont’s screenplay, we’ve glimpsed at various stages throughout the story – without knowing how (or even if) his story is going to intersect with Hadewijch’s. What David represents, and who he might actually be, are arguably the “key” to Hadewijch – if any key there is. Suffice it to say that this grimily ethereal performer’s facial resemblance to Jim Caviezel (of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ) could be termed a divine coincidence.
Some knowledge of the original Hadewijch, a 13th century Dutch mystic poet, might be a help. Dumont provides absolutely zero information about her in the film, but her importance to his themes here is evident from her writings: “He who wishes to follow Love’s way / Must regard neither cost nor shame / Nor pain, he must stand to everything / Even her most terrible commands.”
