Nicholas Roeg, 1976
There's a scene late in The Man Who Fell to Earth where the alien Newton, and his paramour, now aged, play ping pong and sip martinis dressed in tennis whites in a room covered in photographic wallpaper meant to make the room look like a forest. This setting says so much about modern life on Earth, its creepiness, its inauthenticity, its vague decadence with a pretense of gentility, that you get the sense that this is exactly how our planet would look to an outsider.
At first, Man is a science fiction film that isn't one (yes, I realize I said something similar about Ashes of Time); it's hard to get around the disappointment that an alien, upon landing on our planet, would embark upon an exciting foray into...patent law. For about the first half the film Roeg falls into a rhythm of intense scenes buffeted by stretches of tedium. It's a rhythm I've grown accustomed to from Roeg, with the exception of Don't Look Now. This film turns out to be less about space than about the seduction of Earth... a seduction that exists precisely because of it's boringness, and it takes a while for us to readjust our eyes.
Sex scenes (and often they're not even sex scenes, per se, so much as "naked people doing weird stuff" scenes) are always interesting in Roeg; he often gives them an abstract, elliptical quality that seems to speak indirectly to the powerful role time and memory play in eroticism. This movie contains one of the most disturbing sex scenes I've ever seen; you know the aggression in it is not really menacing, but the way it's filmed makes it creepy as hell, and intercutting it with the Japanese sword fight certainly ups the weird factor. I found another scene between Bowie and Candy Clark that I found rather moving, and there's one later with a gun that struck me as sort of rambunctious and maybe not as disturbing as it was supposed to be.
I just saw I Am Love (more on that later) and Bowie here reminded me a lot of Tilda Swinton; he's not as good of an actor, but he does a fine job here. I notice I'm writing a lot about delicacy in male performers, and it could be that that's something I find attractive in men and therefore seek out and find more often than other things. But there's a certain refinement and elegance to him here that doesn't interfere at all with his accessibility; he seemed much more approachable than I expected an alien to be. In that first shot of him running down a hill, covered by a hood, he looks so vulnerable you just want to hold him.
For me the real money shots here are the alien scenes -- thrillingly beautiful and strange.
This film speaks more powerfully about the vagaries of alcohol than many who deal with the subject more directly. The utter debilitating banality of it is fully expressed, and that final shot of Bowie's fedora-covered head lowering down dejectedly speaks volumes and breaks your heart.
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