Moviegoer Diary: Caligula, Investigating Sex

CALIGULA

Plot In A Nutshell
The notorious X-rated, Penthouse-financed 1979 historical epic starring Malcolm McDowell as the insane Roman emperor — officially credited to director Tinto Brass and screenwriter Gore Vidal, but with additional (mostly pornographic) scenes shot and written by many other hands.

Thoughts
Has any movie been more upfront about its troubled production history than Caligula? The behind-the-scenes turmoil is evident right there in the opening credits, which inform us that the movie was “adapted from an original screenplay by Gore Vidal,” and contains “principal photography by Tinto Brass” but “additional scenes directed and photographed by Giancarlo Liu and Bob Guccione.” Most cryptic of all: the credit that reads simply, “edited by the production.”

I can recall being 10 years old and seeing ads in the Hamilton Spectator advertising Caligula. I don’t know which made more of an impression on me: the poster image of an old Roman coin bearing McDowell’s profile, with blood running out of his eyes; or the fact that the tickets were selling for some outrageous price. Six or seven dollars, I think! In hindsight, it was kind of an inspired way to combat the terrible buzz surrounding the film — surely, if the movie was actually as awful as everyone was saying it was, they wouldn’t dare charge extra for it, would they?

I didn’t see Caligula until now, 30 years later, and somehow in all that time, I managed to avoid learning any specifics about it. Oh, sure, I knew that it was probably the most explicit film ever to feature such a prestigious cast (McDowell, Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud), but I had no idea exactly what went on in front of the cameras? Did any of those British stars have sex on camera, or did they just walk around while the extras fucked up a storm? (Turns out, except for McDowell, it’s mostly the latter.) The only specific act of depravity I’d heard about beforehand was the scene where some poor soldier has his penis tied off and then, after he’s forced to drink an enormous quantity of wine, has his bladder sliced open. But I’d always assumed that McDowell did the slicing, when in fact it’s Peter O’Toole, playing the dying, syphilitic emperor Tiberius. An important distinction!

O’Toole gives probably the most memorable performance in the film, pale, gaunt, his naturally skull-like face covered with sores, consumed by his decadent ways even as he exhibits utter contempt for it. O’Toole balances his performance on the sabre-point of comedy — alone among the cast, he grasps the horrible humour of Roman politics, the way each successive ruler must figure out a way to kill as many potential enemies as he can while still remaining popular.

Meanwhile, McDowell — and it pains me to say this, because it seems like such ideal casting — is genuinely terrible as Caligula, telegraphing every emotion and shouting his lines as a way of indicating the emperor's encroaching madness. He seems cast simply for his willingness to do the role — to march around naked in the rain, to lie in bed with his horse like Harpo Marx in Duck Soup, to cavort among all the fornicating extra, and, in a moment I particularly could have lived without, to vomit right into the camera lens.

Caligula’s most valuable player is probably Danilo Donati, whose sets and costumes have the pagan otherworldliness he brought to Fellini films like Roma and Satyricon. Especially impressive is the central room of Tiberius’ court, which has a swimming pool surrounded by a sort of three-level stage with elevators to take him up and down, like Alex Trebek on the old Pitfall game show. There’s also a crazy arena where Caligula buries his enemies in the ground up to their heads, where a kind of octopus-armed series of blades swoops in and decapitates them. But perhaps the most memorable setpiece is the scene where Caligula decides to replenish Rome’s coffers by shanghaiing the senators’ wives into serving as prostitutes in an “imperial brothel” shaped like a gigantic ship, complete with slaves to pull the oars across the imaginary ocean.

Dementia on such a massive scale can’t help but inspire a certain amount of awe, but Caligula is anything but delightful — it’s an ugly-spirited film that may have began with Gore Vidal as an investigation into the allure of depravity, but which somehow turned into a demonstration of it. A couple of times in the film, Caligula sees someone about to die and asks them what it feels like and what they see — I couldn’t help but be reminded of the recent horror film Martyrs, which expands on this idea in a much more intelligent way. As that film demonstrates, you don’t need to be the emperor of Rome to conduct that kind of experiment; if you can remove your conscience, all you need is a secure basement and a good set of surgical knives.

RATING: 1.5/5

* * * * *

INVESTIGATING SEX

Plot In A Nutshell
Writer/director Alan Rudolph’s 2001 drama — released on DVD under the title Intimate Affairs — about a pair of female stenographers (Neve Campbell and Robin Tunney) in 1929 Massachusetts hired to take notes at a salon of artists and writers who gather for a series of quasi-scientific discussions of male sexuality.

Thoughts
I’m beginning to think that the cult of Alan Rudolph, which probably hit its peak in the early ’80s with Choose Me, has now dwindled to a group even smaller than the salon in Investigating Sex. Rudolph hasn’t made a film since 2002’s The Secret Lives of Dentists, and Investigating Sex, from 2001, didn’t even get released on DVD until last December, despite a cast that includes Neve Campbell, Terrence Howard, Jeremy Davies, a naked Robin Tunney, and a naked Julie Delpy. His close association, both personally and professionally, with Robert Altman seemed to help him get projects together, and now that Altman is dead, I worry that Rudolph will find it harder than ever to get his idiosyncratic projects off the ground.

I remember a remarkable interview with Rudolph in Film Comment back in the early ’90s — unbelievably, it was a cover story tied to the release of his now-completely-forgotten film Equinox, starring Matthew Modine as displaced twin brothers — in which Rudolph talked with some pain about all those reviewers who blamed him for Altman’s post-Nashville decline. But me, I loved the way Rudolph borrowed some of the signature elements of Altman’s style — the large casts, the roaming camera — and applied them to his special brand of romantic fable. They seemed like a great creative pair.

My favourite Rudolph film is The Moderns from 1988 (there is probably no film that I’ve rewatched more often), but I have a soft spot for almost all of them — for Choose Me, for Love at Large, for Trouble in Mind, for Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. I forgive him for Breakfast of Champions and Trixie, and wow, do I ever love Equinox. In that Film Comment interview, he insists that if you followed any randomly chosen person with a movie camera for a few days, their life would look a lot more like one of his films than most directors praised for their “gritty realism.”

I like that. And I love the sincerity with which Rudolph portrays love and romance, I love his excellent taste in music, I love all the paintings he hangs on the walls of his sets, I love his unapologetically stylized dialogue, I love his feel for the ’20s and ’30s, and I love the way he doesn’t like to draw a line between the thoughts in his characters’ heads and the images onscreen. Fantasies, subjective realities, get equal weight in Rudolph’s movies — which can sometimes make his films look ridiculous. In Investigating Sex, for instance, you sometimes see things from the point of view of Neve Campbell’s character, which means a few shots of Dermot Mulroney walking around naked.

Investigating Sex doesn’t completely work, but it doesn’t feel like hackwork either — or like the work of any other director, really. Rudolph has got hold of a great subject here — I love the way its characters approach sex as this gigantic, unexplored topic. Are male orgasms more intense than female ones? What do other people think about when they’re having sex? Who knows? The answers could be anything! It’s a pre-technological world where a mythical concept like a succubus can seem more important than the clitoris.

If Investigating Sex seems thin, maybe it’s because Neve Campbell’s virginal stenographer and Dermot Mulroney’s sex researcher never quite generate the necessary sparks. Also, Til Schweiger and John Light, two unknown actors in pivotal supporting roles, are handsome but dull, seemingly cast more for their bone structure than their screen presence. On the other hand, a British actress named Emily Bruni makes a strong impression as the wife of Alan Cumming’s perverse modern artist — she looks like she stepped right out of the Modigliani canvas Keith Carradine forges in The Moderns. And Nick Nolte is a lot of fun as Faldo, Mulroney’s wealthy patron — he gets a bizarre scene where he confesses that the first woman he ever made love to was a donkey.

It’s never quite clear why Faldo allows all these strange people to hang out in his mansion, but apparently it satisfies some perverse urge to thumb his nose at social propriety to have them around. We also learn that he’s bankrolled a series of short films directed by Jeremy Davies’ character, including an unsettling erotic short starring the neighbourhood butcher. Maybe that’s what Alan Rudolph needs to do: find himself a Faldo, and fast.

RATING: 3.5/5