Jeff Lieberman's Blue Sunshine (1976) merits a lot of praise: its script, written by Liberman, is literate and genuine with its dialogue easy and real and its drama engrossing and well-paced; the performances by the actors are all professional, competent, and well-done; and as for entertainment, few films so unabashedly deliver. To use overused adjectives (of which I am abashedly guilty), Blue Sunshine is a unique film from a unique film maker.
Beautiful Wendy (Ann Cooper) is babysitting the next-door neighbor's children and reading them a story. She's slightly on edge and easily prone to getting a headache. Wendy split from her husband, Ed Flemming (Mark Goddard), whose face litters the street from posters and from the television: Ed's running for Congress. One of the children who Wendy is babysitting takes a cue from the Rapunzel fairy tale to which she is listening and tugs Wendy's hair. Quite a handful comes out of Wendy's head from the little child's fingers.
John O'Malley (Bill Cameron) is a beat cop looking to promote to detective. His wife Barbara is seeking consolation from a neighbor: John has been absent from the home a lot, and when he returns, he has often been drinking. Guess what? He has been losing his hair too.
At a party, Jerry Zipkin (Zalman King) is cooling out with his lady, Alicia (Deborah Winters). Actor Brion James is at the party, also, and pretends to be a bird and caws and flaps his arms like wings. James's bird performance is not the weirdest thing to happen at the party. This is: Frannie (Richard Crystal), presumably the host, comes downstairs and happily thanks everyone for coming. He decides to sing a song and as he is really getting in a groove, Frannie grabs one of his guest's dates and gives her a friendly tussle. Her date is a little jealous and grabs Frannie's hair. Pop goes the weasel and off comes Frannie's wig. He is totally bald and his eyes bulge to the size of golf balls. He rushes out the door, and save three female party guests, everyone leaves to search for Frannie in town. Jerry, alone, searches the immediate surroundings for Frannie. To reveal anymore of Blue Sunshine would be a sin, but Jerry keeps searching throughout the film for answers stemming from this night.
Hair: every one wants it, cannot keep it, and does not know why they are losing it. While paranoia and conspiracies were major themes of 1970s American cinema, Blue Sunshine is centered around a quasi-conspiracy and its lead, Zalman King's Jerry Zipkin is not fueled by paranoia: there are real people out to get him, and as he investigates and as the intricate mystery unfolds, the root of the hair problem (rim shot) lies with a circle of friends who all attended Stanford University ten years prior. 
Most conspiracies are ludicrous and incredulous, and Lieberman with his script, instead of shading over this aspect, indulges it in Blue Sunshine. His narrative is so well-paced with the drama so absorbing that when clues to the quasi-conspiracy are revealed, they do not take the viewer out of the action. Yes, the revelations are ridiculous, but these diverse characters do not think so, especially Jerry. Liberman creates such an intimacy and familiarity with his characters that they drive the narrative. One of the best crafted relationships is between Jerry and his friend, Dr. David Blume (Robert Walden). Despite the fact that after an absence of years the two reunite over a gunshot wound and discuss the efficacy of tranquilizers on psychotic human subjects, these two appear as close friends. Super-cute Alicia is Jerry's accomplice, and in a pivotal moment during the wonderfully over-the-top final act, it appears as if she has had too much to drink at the bar and is a little tipsy: a little human touch to the script that is quite endearing. Another well-done and quirky sequence involves Jerry, who by this point in the film is desperate for information, and his first meeting with beautiful Wendy. Considering the ludicrous nature of the subject matter, subtlety and tact would be Jerry's best method for questioning Wendy. Nope. Jerry stumbles embarrassingly over his words and scares Wendy tremendously. This scene really accentuates how desperate Jerry is but also shows a lot of humility from his character. Like every one else, with perhaps the exception of Big Number Thirty Two, Wayne Mulligan (Ray Young), these are down-to-earth, familiar characters caught up in totally absurd circumstances.
Zalman King really gets into his role as Jerry Zipkin. At times, it would seem that he is overacting but more often than not, it just appears this actor is a really big fan of James Dean and Marlon Brando and following suit. Cooper as Wendy and Winters as Alicia are terrific. Cooper has a fantastic sequence following Jerry's exit from her apartment (It's also one of Lieberman's best and most exciting set-pieces). Like Cooper, Winters shines from the beginning, and as her character develops, she gives a depth to her character instead of simply becoming a plot device. Walden and Young, as Blume and Mulligan, respectively, round out a very good cast of actors.
Certainly, Blue Sunshine is appropriate for the drive-in, yet there's so much quirky fun that it is fun even in the digital format. (There is an excellent special edition DVD from Synapse, and it's also part of an Elvira two-feature DVD which makes a for a late-nite, VHS experience.) Nearly all of Lieberman's cinema takes outlandish premises with a real focus on character and depth: Squirm (1978), Just Before Dawn (1981), Remote Control (1988), and Satan's Little Helper (2004). The premises are not taken seriously, but the films certainly are. Likewise, as with Blue Sunshine, so much fun is to be had, let your hair go loose and enjoy.
Huh? What? Christine parades around the boudoir nude and asks for a drink and a cigarette to a perturbed John. Christine is successful in only securing a ride from him. He takes her to Soho where she flees from the car with his car keys in hand. John finds her in a flat where a private film screening is taking place. The film appears to be a loop where Christine walks into frame nude in front of a veiled woman on a four-post bed. Very provocative. The veiled woman has a scar on her neck and is wearing an unusual ring. John recognizes this jewelry and the woman's scar as belonging to his dead wife, Helen. Did Helen have a shady cinematic past or is this the new Helen, not really dead. John broods to begin his investigation.
At this point, like Lucio Fulci with Una sull'altra of the same year (Fulci shares a story credit on Liz and Helen incidentally), Riccardo Freda can take his story in three directions: a deductive murder mystery with John as prime suspect; an amateur giallo-esque mystery with John as sleuth with the mysterious veiled woman as the object of his investigation; or John can plumb the provocative depths, tumbling further into the looking-glass, opened by sultry sprite, Christine. Freda chooses all three, creating an uneven and unsuccessful film with A doppia faccia. 
To begin with, as a deductive mystery, A doppia faccia clearly fails. The only expository clue left by Freda is an insert shot of a black-gloved hand tampering with the brakes on Helen's Jaguar. Beyond the obvious fact that Helen's crash was intentional, little is shown to the viewer to begin an investigation. As to whom has the strongest motive for murder, none of the first-act's participants, John, Liz, or Helen's father, have one. Therefore, Freda and Scotland Yard have to manufacture one. With nothing at the crash scene in the way of direct evidence to implicate a suspect, the police focus on a wisp of circumstantial evidence: John's three-week vacation in St. Tropez. Other circumstantial evidence is presented in Liz and Helen, yet what the police choose to focus upon is far from the obvious. Since Freda only conveniently drops clues for his viewer, the viewer is playing catch-up with the mystery, and virtually no suspense plays out from this thread of the film.
Kinski's John is immediately taken with discovering the identity of the veiled woman in the film. As to why is unknown. This aspect of the story becomes Freda's strongest. For example, Kinski's John is shown as quiet, brooding, and ineffectual at the beginning towards Helen; yet when Christine enters his life, Kinski violently changes his personality. He has no problem getting physical with Christine: he grabs her and shakes her; yells at her; and even beats her in order to gain information about the veiled woman's identity. This juxtaposition of John's character makes the viewer wonder as to if this is the real John, and Freda was cleverly masking this aspect of his personality during the first act. The link is both characters of Helen and Christine: each is, in a very traditional, superficial, and stereotypical sense, a deviant in society and from a traditional moral perspective. Although Freda is never overt, there is the overwhelming sense from the first act that Helen's lack of affection towards John and her strong kinship with Liz are more than they seem. Helen's real affection and love are for Liz; and her marriage was a sham for polite society with John as a victim of unrequited love. Kinski's signature brooding with his performance as John hid a simmering anger towards Helen (and possibly women). When he meets Christine, who is engaged in both prostitution and pornography, his anger towards Helen comes to the surface, and John acts out towards Christine as he wished he would have towards Helen. Or, perhaps within the shadows of the domestic scenes of the first act, Kinski's John was violent towards Helen (where she got that scar on her neck is wholly unknown). Unintentionally- or intentionally-crafted, these scenes from Freda are his strongest and most engaging. The two traditional "deviants" are seen in a different perspective while Kinski's character becomes, at times quite effectively, more sinister. These themes are signature giallo, especially the misogynistic aspect; yet Freda moves little beyond themes within A doppia faccia, as Kinski's John does little in the way of investigation. Like the viewer, John stumbles through his investigation with whatever Freda gives him, instead of picking up clues and deducing what to do next.
Finally, Freda can just let go in A doppia faccia (as the Italian title suggests) with his main character, John (and all of his other characters, for that matter). Liz and Helen is shot cleanly and focused with totally uninteresting shot designs. This mechanical conservatism with Freda's compositions carries over into the substance of A doppia faccia. Virtually no eroticism is present throughout, despite the fact that Freda and company want to be provocative with the Soho subculture and Helen, Liz, and Christine's characters. The depiction of Helen's character is just cold. Some insight into her character with dialogue or a confrontational scene (really anything) would have been welcomed. Arguably Incontrera's Liz is not a character at all: Freda gives the viewer almost nothing behind Liz. She is a plot device for a later revelation and becomes a potentially provocative character wasted. Kruger's Christine gives A doppia faccia a lot of energy, but Freda uses her also as mostly a plot device. The brilliant set-ups, of which there are very few, like Helen and Liz alone or Christine's first fortuitous meeting with John are undercut and poorly handled. Overall, too much thought went into mechanics in making A doppia faccia, and too little thought went into creating emotion, energy, or artistic flare. The set design, however, is beautiful, and Kinski gives another excellent, yet perfunctory, performance.
Silva is in a prison cell but not for long. With inhuman strength, he begins to disassemble the steel from the cell's furniture and mold it in his hands. Bending the bars and descending a wet-sheet rope, Silva's Ristack escapes. After a quick police elusion, Ristack holes up with his homie, Marco (Georges Géret), who owns a small cafe. Less than twenty-four hours after busting out of the joint, Ristack is ready to work. He arrives at gentleman's club, The Hippodrome, to see its owner, Milan (André Pousse), and his shady colleagues. The Insolent has a proposition for Milan: a daylight heist of an armored truck with its cargo several hundred pounds of gold. Would Milan be interesting in fronting this perfectly-planned heist, asks Ristack, and providing a fence to move the gold after? Milan agrees and offers to rendez-vous with Ristack and his crew at an isolated villa to trade the gold for hard currency. Ristack with Marco's help assembles a crew of desperate conmen and thieves. 
At around the halfway mark of L'insolent, the heist is executed and Ristack and company meet Milan for payment. As with most crime cinema in the 1970s, there were only a handful of plots, and with the rare exception (for example, Le cercle rouge (1970), directed by Jean-Pierre Melville) the plots were often the least interesting aspect of the cinema, usually perfunctory and predictable. L'insolent belongs in this majority class; but the devil is in the details; and Roy's flourishes give L'insolent its charm: while the film is set in present day, the overall feel of L'insolent puts it in some other reality. 
To begin with, the wonderfully ridiculous: while the police detectives later make an appearance in L'insolent, the beat cops take to the scene first after Ristack's escape. While executing an immediate area search from the prison, two cops encounter Silva's character, garbed in mechanic's overalls behind the counter of a gas station. Tersely, Silva resists a shakedown: "I'm only paid to work behind this counter." He hasn't seen anyone come by. When the cops command Ristack to lower the car on the mechanic's lift to have a look inside, they might as well as made a sweet polite request: Silva just gives a stare and says he ain't the mechanic and doesn't have the key to the lift. So much for thorough investigation, as the cops leave without Silva breaking a sweat. The police ineptitude rises to the level of buffoonery in a later scene after Silva's Ristack sets off a chain of explosions in the parked cars in front of The Hippodrome. "Hey, need some help?" asks one of the police officers. "No," says a Hippodrome henchman, "it was just a short circuit. All in hand." "Okay, then. Bye." The inclusion of these beat-cop scenes are somewhat baffling: as plot devices as tension builders, they clearly fail, as it's quite immediate that they're not catching Silva's Ristack or really going to make any progress in an investigation. Perhaps their ineffectuality is a joke on Roy's part, channeling the spirit of his film's title; but their inclusion is too labored to merit just a chuckle. Whatever reason, these scenes aren't grounded in any reality.
The Hippodrome, the gentleman's club run by Pousse's Milan, is L'insolent's most indulgent set-piece. Patrons play board games, by rolling ridiculously large dice, with the club's female dancers as game pieces while each of the ladies is scantily-clad in fetish/futuristic garb. The club sequences are too meticulous to be sloughed off as just a gangster's front. Again, perhaps Roy is channeling the spirit of his title, as these scenes are wilfully provocative, providing most of the flesh in the film and the flash. Likewise, these scenes aren't grounded in any reality.
Veteran Pousse as Milan is pretty terrific, as well. His character also has a charming insolent demeanor, totally different from Silva's and unique to him. Director Jean-Claude Roy will more than likely be remembered for his subsequent adult cinema in which actress Brigitte Lahaie delivered some of her most memorable performances (for example in Couple cherche esclave sexuel (1979)). Instead of delivering a perfunctory, gritty, violent crime flick, Roy delivers a perfunctory, playful and weird, violent crime flick with L'insolent. As 70s European crime cinema continues to gain a cult following, certainly Silva fans and eurocrime fans will pull this one out of obscurity.
A lackadaisical style and a laissez-faire attitude towards its genre are the true hidden treasures of Cinq filles en furie. Infused more with innuendo than bullets, Cinq filles is early Pécas erotica, allowing his imagination to think of various scenarios for short shorts and skirt flashes and charged emotions. Its narrative is true pulp fiction and can only be transcended by being provocative and playful. Pécas is not wholly successful with Cinq filles, but there's such a rebellious spirit to the whole film for its veiled disdain for strict adherence to genre conventions. For example, Isabel fires her rifle at seemingly everything and kills nothing. Her rifle makes a lot of noise and appears more annoying than intimidating to most. In the sole sequence where Isabel dons her dress and arms herself with a beautiful smile (once revealed), she is far more successful in capturing what she wants. Although Andrews's Jenny doesn't drive the narrative, she often stands out above all, not just for her beauty but her attitude towards life: what's the point in chasing something, if you do not want its object? When looking for the cache under Isabel's orders, Jenny is truly strolling--whatever adventures appear before her are far more exciting than this ridiculous pursuit. 
Zhmurki (Dead Man's Bluff) is a film directed by Alexsey Balabanov and released in 2005. Sergei (Aleksei Panin) and Simon (Dmitriy Dyuzhev) work for Mikhajlovich (Nikita Mikhalkov), the local crime boss, and are effing up their first two jobs of the morning--one, collecting money from The Doctor; and two, delivering a case to a lawyer and picking up a case in return. Mikhajlovich, after their two eff-ups, gives the pair one more chance to perform a successful task for him--clean up the mess created by their two previous eff-ups. Time to visit The Cop.
Balabanov's Dead Man's Bluff chooses as its setting recent history in Russia which, undoubtedly, speaks more to its culture. It is unknown as to whether Balabanov wants to transcend his culture with his story and his visual depiction of his story. Like a joke, the more familiar the listener is with the joke's set-up and details, then the potential for the punchline to be funnier is greatly increased. However, scenes like the initial one, set in 2005 in a university classroom where an economics lecture is given, give Dead Man's Bluff the feeling that perhaps the film is intended for a wider audience, like giving a set-up to a set-up to a joke for unfamiliar viewers. Despite any familiarity with the history of the setting or the setting and its culture, Balabanov's Dead Man's Bluff plays out like a playful joke, fluctuating in seriousness and disturbing, like giving a hearty laugh and then giving an uncomfortable sigh upon reflection at the joke's subject matter. Comedy is extremely difficult to craft but highly successful and entertaining when done well. More challenging is to infuse comedy with dark and disturbing material, and when that comedy is successful, the result is Dead Man's Bluff.
Set in a world of small business whose business is crime, The Butcher stands over his bound captive with his syringe in hand and myriad dead corpses littered around his shop. Balabanov's composition (like most within Dead Man's Bluff, it is static and meticulously-framed) is far too disturbing to induce a chuckle alone, so he allows The Butcher to pontificate on his impressive attributes and abilities. It's unsurprising that he is so successful. Three hooded gunmen make a surprise entrance and contribute to the corpses. How about The Doctor? Balabanov's composition of The Doctor is far too ridiculous, looking like a mad scientist behind his Bunsen burner and beakers, to be taken seriously. Sergei and Simon try shaking him down for protection money, but The Doctor doesn't need to pay outsiders for protection: he has two hulking bodyguards on his payroll, and they make a fortuitous entrance into The Doctor's laboratory. Corpses and their blood end up spilling everywhere. The Boar has a driver in a slick Mercedes and has become successful in the Center. The Boar hands his business card to Sergei in front of the McDonald's restaurant where inside Simon purchases an extra-value meal for seventy-three thousand roubles.
From its opening, Dead Man's Bluff presents the early days of the generation of start-up capital for future business entrepreneurs, where the overhead are corpses and the collateral is violence. Beyond the very cleverly rendered humor, like the business file that Sergei carries everywhere, Balabanov portrays his brutal violence in a business-like manner: the victims will cry for help and scream, but their executioners are without emotion, like workers suffering from the banality of routine. Balabanov embraces his executioners' (lack of) emotion and tone with his visual style. If his killers have no qualms with the amount of blood that they are shedding and corpses literally piling up, then neither does Balabanov. This seeming detachment from its director makes Dead Man's Bluff, like the game referenced in its English-language title, kind of dangerous. Often viewers, like joke listeners, want to be on the inside as to what is going on. Being on the outside of a joke or a movie, often the listener or viewer, respectively, feels as if the joke is on him/her or at his/her expense. With often static compositions and sombre colors, Balabanov frames his images like still-life paintings with its subject matter far from the familiar. The humor pulls the viewer in closer to the action while its disturbing matter attempts to push the viewer back out.
Zhmurki (Dead Man's Bluff) is fun. Balabanov appears in his position to feel totally comfortable being under no obligation to tell his viewer how to feel. This is true court-jester cinema: being playful and creative, making the jokes at every one's expense, including his own, while his subject matter is undoubtedly important and relevant. All the performances are tops. Truly unique.
The two above quotes are from Shinya Tsukamoto in reference to his 2002 film, A Snake of June. If his film were nothing but images evoked from within his first quote, then Snake would still be devastating. If it were only a film of two sequences--of Rinko, portrayed by Asuka Kurosawa, taking two public walks, each in her miniskirt, both charged with two radically different emotions, then Snake would still tell its story. Finally, if the film were nothing but a series of animated still images, with their style monochromatic and shot in 1:1.33 aspect ratio, where Tsukamoto found inspiration in Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, and Bruce Weber, then Tsukamoto's rendition of images would still surpass many of his contemporaries working in the visual medium.
Rinko works at a crisis center as a telephone counselor and receives anonymous calls from the public of tales of suicide and the like. She lives in quiet comfort with her salaryman husband, Shigehiko (Yuji Kohtari), who is often distant from Rinko and prefers to be alone reading or scrubbing the sink or the bathtub. Despite the lack of emotional intimacy in their relationship, each shares a comfort in its predictability and normalcy. One day Rinko receives in the mail an envelope containing a series of still photographs of her in repose or walking the streets; and as she flips through the numerous photographs (to be noted, not incidentally, artistically and professionally captured), the final series at the end of the stack reveals Rinko in quite an intimate moment and alone. Rinko feels understandably violated by this intrusion and overcome with fear of the photographer. When a cellular phone arrives via mail and its caller, a familiar voice to Rinko from her crisis center work, demands that Rinko reproduce her behavior evoked from the still photographic images, Rinko consents--seemingly only in exchange to receive the original negatives to the photos and to hopefully hide them away, not just from her husband but from the world.
A Snake of June makes the heart beat fast: fear, excitement, and eroticism. The film's closest and most sensitive portrayal is in Rinko, not just with the camera's treatment but with her emotion. As she reluctantly begins her first display for the caller, who commands her from time to time to change her outfit, walk in a particular area, or perform some task, the fear and discomfort which radiates from Rinko is overwhelming. The caller attempts to coax Rinko into revealing her true sexual desires, as if the caller, by capturing Rinko alone and in an intimate moment, now possesses knowledge of her secrets. What the caller painfully and powerfully fails to recognize is those secrets and desires belong Rinko alone. The irony, of course, is what the caller desires most from Rinko, she later displays willingly and perhaps not solely for him. When Rinko uncoils, so to speak, the desire to do so does not come from the pitiful voice on the phone. Any excitement comes for the viewer at Rinko's expense and it's uncomfortable watching Rinko the subject to many a prying eye. Kurosawa gives a stellar performance, completely vulnerable, as Rinko.
One of Tsukamoto's favorite motifs is the triangle, and the characters behind the caller and Kohtari's Shigehiko are revealed, in true Tsukamoto fashion, as not vehicles but well-drawn people. Their characters become the most revelatory during Rinko's second display in A Snake of June, which by this point is in Tsukamoto's world, opened, perhaps by a Pandora-ish Rinko.
The bluish tint to the monochromatic images within A Snake of June are unique coming from a unique film maker. Tsukamoto is wholly successful in creating animated images which are evocative of his still-photographic inspiration. Most of the settings are clean and clinical, like the crisis center, Rinko and Shigehiko's home, and the myriad public places where Rinko walks. These are wonderfully and powerfully offset by Tsukamoto's subjective and artistic shots with especially the use of water in the scenery. The compositions are fantastic, and as always, Tsukamoto tells two stories always, one with his visuals and another with his narrative. A Snake of June is a strong mix of naturalistic scenes, scenes of man-made structures, and the beautifully imagined sequences where Tsukamoto journeys into dreamland. The atmosphere which Tsukamoto feels when "it gets humid and hot in Japan" is, finally, also successfully translated to his film.