Talkin' melodramatic kiwi insertion blues
Singapore Sling - dir. Nikos Nikolaidis (1990)
I have a cautious attitude towards notoriously "extreme" films because more often than not they tend to overestimate their visual power: you try to watch the movie, but all you can think of is the director going "aren't I daring and uncompromising?" The more obvious it is the film is meant to be either hated or loved passionately, the more likely it is that it turns out to be either mediocre or apathetically awful instead.
No surprise then that the Synapse DVD of this greek shocker has been lying on my shelf unwatched for a year. Finally got around to viewing it and now it's time to spill the beans, puke on them, cut someone's entrails out, wallow in the steaming mess for awhile and eventually it eat it all up till I puke again.
Ever since the loftiest years of postmodern theory the constructed myths of masculinity in Hollywood cinema and action movies in particular have been under the scrutiny of cultural historians. One of the key concepts in this discussion is the myth of "the wounded man", a masochistic, victimised protagonist introduced in films such as the Die Hard series, that supposedly reflected the crisis of masculinity as opposed to the all-powerful automatons of the eighties films like Commando and First Blood. Many studies tend to understate the fact that this type of character is not by any means a new invention.
In Singapore Sling Nikos Nikolaidis seems very keen to remind us of how self-destructive but ultimately purified male characters played part and parcel in the film noir aesthetic. His main character is an already beaten down, literally wounded private eye in search of his long lost "Laura". He stumbles across a house where a mother and daughter duo of femme-fatales-on-overdrive subject him to a whirlpool of sadism, torture and mind games relating to the mythical Laura, who, as it seems, they've already killed before. A noir parody at heart, the film revolves around manically over-emphasised themes of sadomasochism and obsession that were more or less implicit in the obvious point of reference, Preminger's Laura.
From time to time, the film does manage to communicate something essential about the film noir melodramatics: it's beautifully shot in black and white, and at best, the set pieces and the harrowing use of the original theme music of "Laura" nicely accentuate the, uh - "proceedings". Time after time Nikolaidis builds the atmosphere of melancholia and longing for the past, only to tear it apart by frustratingly mannered distancing devices. This deconstruction of noir clichés give the film an unfortunate, dry intellectual slant. Paired with the psychotic sexual content, these two elements often cancel each other out, depriving the whole mess of effectiveness and hysteria it so achingly needs.
I'm tempted to make a somewhat lazy comparison here just to prove a point. Yeah, I'm going to bring up Thundercrack!, my favourite sick little puppy among the art porn fare, and a film Nikolaidis must have been very aware of. Here's another overblown but meticulously stylized parody, although in this case the hapless victims are "the old dark house" movies like Cat and the Canary. In the same vein as Singapore Sling, Thundercrack! somehow manages to be kind of subdued and melancholic even through all the gorilla/cucumber/blow-up doll/you-name-it sex scenes. But what makes Thundercrack! a winner is the fact that it doesn't even try to be too meaningful or thought out, while still coming across as an item out of time and space, so deep in it's own messy reality it's nothing short of utterly charming. While Singapore Sling does have its momentary lapses into delightfully outdated Freudian symbolism, for the most part it's a case of controlled madness, and that's no kind of madness at all.
I'll give Singapore Sling 2 kiwi fruits and 1 Daddy's Big Knife.