Park Chan-Wook (2013)

By interesting coincidence, I saw Stoker only a couple of days after seeing Don’t Look Now again.  The jagged style of Roeg’s film is continuously (and, to me, monotonously) disorienting.   With Stoker, the disorientation is caused by the seductive flow and movement of the images:  some of the cuts are more startling because they’re so smooth – and the smoothness contradicts the disturbing nature of what’s on screen.  David Edelstein has written harshly and Anthony Lane dismissively about Stoker but I’m amazed they found it boring:  Park Chan-Wook’s first American movie is one of the most enjoyable new films of recent months.   For the few first minutes, I thought the composition of the images might become tiresome – in fact it becomes fascinating because it’s achieved so effortlessly.  The screenplay by Wentworth Miller (who played the young Coleman Silk in The Human Stain) – centred on a murderous Uncle Charlie and a niece who has to grow up quickly in order to survive him – is clearly indebted to the overrated Shadow of a Doubt, although the obvious similarities to that particular Hitchcock end there.  In Shadow of a Doubt, the niece, Charlotte, is known as Charlie too – the young heroine of Stoker is called India.  In the Hitchcock movie, Uncle Charlie is Charlotte’s mother’s brother and her father, a passionate reader of crime fiction, is very much around.   Stoker begins with the funeral of India’s beloved father, which is where his brother Charlie, just returned from ‘abroad’, makes his reappearance to the family.   India’s widowed mother Evelyn is as keen to sink her teeth sexually into her brother-in-law as he is to deflower his virgin niece.  As those words suggest, the vampiric quality of the relationships is hard to miss but it’s not apparent that Miller’s screenplay connects in any more detail than that to Bram Stoker or his works.  Park Chan-Wook, however, includes several other Hitchcock references – especially to Psycho:  stuffed birds, a swinging light, a pivotal shower scene.  (India’s development from awkward teenager to havoc-wreaking young woman brings Stephen King/Brian De Palma’s Carrie to mind too.)

The seductive quality of the film-making chimes with Charlie’s insinuation into the lives of Evelyn and India.  Attempting to resist Park Chan-Wook is akin to India’s efforts to deny the effect her uncle is having on her.  You can resist the director’s macabre heartlessness but you’re pulled in – may even be buoyed – by it.  Stoker is suffused with sexual feeling and has two particularly erotic sequences:  Charlie and India’s duet at the piano; and Evelyn’s attempted seduction of Charlie, with ‘Summer Wine’ by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood supplying a glorious accompaniment. The film’s eroticism is strengthened by the absence of any scenes of people actually going to bed together but there’s strong, sometimes disturbing intimacy between different pairings:  India and Charlie; India and her father Richard (in flashbacks); Charlie and Evelyn.  There’s a counteracting distance between the mother (one of the least maternal presences in films of recent years) and her daughter (who always seems more mature than the parent:  they could have been Edina and Saffy in another life).   Some aspects of the plot don’t bear too close inspection.  There’s conveniently little interest in Charlie’s past from those outside the family circle (in the course of the film he reduces the number of people who are in the know about his childhood misdemeanours and lengthy incarceration).  When India discovers a cache of letters Charlie wrote to her from various international ports of call – and which her father kept hidden from his daughter – she’s slow to notice that the back of each envelope is printed with the address of a mental institution.  Wentworth Miller’s screenplay is serviceable, though, and Park Chan-Wook makes the story beguiling:  your awareness of the discrepancy between the quality of the material and the quality of the film-making is part of the fun.

It took me a while to get used to Mia Wasikowska’s dark hair; by the end of the movie it belonged to her.  India’s father dies on her eighteenth birthday; Wasikowska was twenty-two when the film was shot and at first she seems too old for the role.  Although she conveys India’s childish seriousness and wilfulness strongly, she has to work a bit to do so.  But, as India becomes grown up, Wasikowska’s witty finesse comes into its own.  As he showed recently in Dancing on the Edge, the mostly hollow Stephen Poliakoff serial on BBC2, Matthew Goode has humour to spare and this is used to great effect in the first half of Stoker.  He never forces Charlie’s sinisterness – that he is sinister nevertheless is more worrying because Goode suggests that Charlie is someone who doesn’t take himself too seriously.   Goode’s Charlie isn’t so powerful once he’s fully revealed as a psychopathic killer – but this hardly matters because India, in order to establish her independence, is moving to homicidal centre-stage by this point.  Matthew Goode has great eyes – perhaps the best moment of what he does here comes when he takes the light out of them as Charlie dispatches his Aunt Gwendolyn, who’s well played by Jacki Weaver.  Nicole Kidman’s elaborate self-awareness works for her in this role – her neurotic appetency as Evelyn is really entertaining.  The combination of the faces and characterisations of the three leads – and of Dermot Mulroney as India’s father – makes the generational boundaries between them unusually fluid, enriches the perversity of the film’s sexual soup.   (This is one of several ways in which Stoker would have been less effective if Colin Firth, the original choice for Uncle Charlie, had played the role.)

The violence is abundant but stylish – and you don’t recoil:  you’re absorbed because you soon realise that Park Chan-Wook will make the images worth looking at.  A few examples:  blood-spattered flowers; the way Charlie breaks the neck of a teenage boy (Alden Ehrenreich); India’s stabbing another boy with a pencil and the subsequent bit involving her and a pencil sharpener.  The rhyming of images is alluring too.  India does a kind of jumping jacks exercise lying on her bed; it’s reprised later in a flashback to the boy Charlie’s movements as he lies atop the mound concealing the younger brother he has just buried alive.  Matthew Goode’s nose strokes Nicole Kidman’s cheek in their final embrace; as India and her father wait in long grass to shoot wild birds,  Dermot Mulroney’s nose passes over the muzzle of his gun (I nearly Freudian-slip-mistyped that as ‘nuzzle’).   India inherits from her father her ability as a crack shot and from her uncle a desire to dispose of people in her own way.  The cinematography is by Chun-Hoon Chung; the music by Clint Mansell sometimes suggests Philip Glass (who, according to Wikipedia, was at one point going to do the film’s score).

4 March 2013