The Prodigal Cinephile

Happy Canada Day! This month’s post honors that country’s first citizen of cinema, David Cronenberg, and its de facto national cocktail, the Caesar. To begin with the former, here’s a picture of my Neon DVD copy of Crimes of the Future, one of *my* best movies of the 21st century so far:

It’s also currently available on Hulu with a subscription and via a number of other platforms for a rental fee, and some people may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

Everyone in my household except me is a Canadian citizen and we spend a lot of time north of the border, so Caesars are a staple of our holiday and other gatherings. I knew that I eventually wanted to write about a drink from the excellent book Caesar Country: Cocktails, Clams & Canada by Aaron Harowitz & Zack Silverman, which was published the same year this series began, and when I settled on Crimes of the Future as the movie I’d be pairing it with the choice became obvious. Here’s how to make our very slightly modified version of their ingenious Waltermelon:

1 1/2 ozs. Reposado tequila (Espolòn)
2 ozs. Watermelon juice
2 ozs. Caesar mix
1/4 oz. Simple syrup
1/4 oz. Lemon juice

Make the Caesar mix by roasting 4 1/2 lbs. halved Roma tomatoes cut-side down on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or a Silpat mat with a seeded, stemmed, and halved jalapeño chili (skin-side up) and four whole cloves of garlic with their skins left on about 30 minutes until nicely browned. Let cool completely, then remove the skins from the garlic, add everything to a blender with two tablespoons fresh oregano (or two teaspoons dried), and blend until smooth. Add one cup of water, 1/2 cup clam juice, 1/4 cup lemon juice, 1/4 cup simple syrup, and two teaspoons sea salt and blend again to homogenize. Add 1/4 teaspoon cayenne powder, 1/4 teaspoon celery seed, 1/4 teaspoon freshly-ground black pepper, 1/4 teaspoon onion powder, and 1/4 teaspoon paprika and quickly blend again. Strain the mixture through a fine-mesh strainer and cheesecloth (you’ll need to squeeze, which can be messy if you’re not careful) and adjust the consistency with additional water as needed and/or seasoning with more salt. To make the cocktail, stir all of the ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled Collins or highball glass rimmed with kosher salt. Serve on the rocks garnished with cubes of feta cheese and watermelon on a skewer.

This beverage is certain to surprise and delight Caesar fans for sure, but even more so anyone who only knows its cousin the Bloody Mary. Thanks to the addition of watermelon juice, which per Harowitz & Silverman was inspired by an observation by chef José Andrés that “tomatoes with watermelon is a simple, refreshing, and perfectly balanced combination,” it’s sweeter and much lighter in body than the brunch staple you’re familiar with, which I personally find unpleasantly sludgy. Watermelon is also probably the flavor that will dominate your initial impression, but only because it’s unexpected: starting with the second sip, it feels like the world’s most natural companion to the umami-rich Caesar base. Finally, there’s a nice bit of heat on the finish, which is also where you finally pick up agave notes from the tequila and the oregano (one of the ingredients in the original Caesar created by Calgary bartender Walter Chell, as the book notes) we added as a second connection to Greece, where Crimes of the Future was shot. The first is of course the cubed feta garnish, which reminds me a bit of these trapezoidal purple “candy bars”:

They aren’t actually candy, hence the scare quotes: this is, rather, what you eat after you get the elective surgery that leaves these scars:

And replaces your digestive system with one capable of converting reprocessed industrial waste into energy. But we’re getting just a bit ahead of ourselves. Following the opening credits sequence that inspired this month’s drink photo:

Crimes of the Future begins with a shot of a structure that looks simultaneously futuristic and decrepit viewed from the shoreline of a rocky beach:

The camera pulls back to reveal a boy (Sotiris Siozos) sitting next to a rusty can and digging in the water with a spoon:

Then circles around to the right before tracking in, almost as if were studying him. A woman’s voice says “Brecken” and he looks up:

Cut to a long shot of the speaker, his mother Djuna (Lihi Kornowski): “I don’t want you eating anything you find in there, you understand me? I don’t care what it is.”

Cut back to Brecken, who rises, then back to a medium shot of Djuna as she mutters “I don’t care what it is” to herself a second time, her voice quavering.

It’s an odd exchange and on a first viewing the logical assumption is that she’s concerned about him consuming marine animals or fish, possibly because the water is polluted? But the real cause of her duress is revealed about 30 seconds later when Brecken finishes brushing his teeth and begins to munch on a plastic wastebasket as Djuna looks on:

What happens next is even more shocking. As Brecken sleeps, Djuna smothers him with a pillow:

She confesses her crime over the phone in the scene that follows, and although her words are unrepentant (“yes, yes, I mean the Brecken thing”), there are tears in her eyes when she hangs up:

The person at the other end of the line is an associate of Djuna’s ex-husband Lang (Scott Speedman), who is understandably also reduced to sobs when he shows up to claim his son’s body:

And with one murder in the books, we’re off. The next shot introduces us to Crimes of the Future‘s protagonists, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux). She awakens him from a restless night in his LifeFormWare OrchidBed with good news: there’s a new hormone in his body!

You see, he suffers from a condition called Accelerated Evolution Syndrome whereby his body produces new organs, which Caprice tattoos while they’re still in his body:

Then removes in front of a live audience using another LifeFormWare product, the Sark autopsy module, which has made them stars of the performance art world:

There’s no need for anesthesia or sterilization because human beings have ceased to feel pain except in their sleep and infections have disappeared for reasons unknown. People now get their thrills from a new fad called “desktop surgery,” which basically consists of cutting into each other:

And the entire situation is making the government nervous. As the two bureaucrats who staff the National Organ Registry it establishes in response explain, “human evolution is the concern. That it’s going wrong. That it’s . . . uncontrolled, it’s . . . insurrectional.”

Violet Lucca reads Crimes as being deeply autobiographical in her monograph on Cronenberg, but immediately goes on to note that there’s far more going on here than just taking stock and settling scores:

Saul is Cronenberg himself, performance art is cinema, “body art” is “body horror” (the questionable subgenre Cronenberg supposedly invented), the National Organ Registry stands in for TIFF and Telefilm Canada, and Timlin (Kristen Stewart) and Wippet (Don McKellar), the jittery geeks who work at the NOR, are a heady mix of film fans and people who work in film (critics, archivists, programmers, publicists, or whatever). However, the way in which these parallels are drawn–and Saul’s succinctly croaked objections to the various interpretations of his work, the state of performance art, and to the state of the world–are commentaries that are just as applicable to our reality as they are in the film’s. The government’s endeavors to control both art and body are meant to protect those who are already powerful, going so far as to deny nature and very clear biological warnings.

What takes the movie to the next level and makes it what Neil Bahadur calls on Letterboxd “one of the most visionary works of science fiction in the history of cinema” is how this is accomplished: “it deemphasizes technology for exploring changes in human habit, psychology, and physiology.” Deemphasizes is exactly the word–there’s plenty of tech in the movie, but like LifeFormWare’s Breakfaster Chair it’s shown to be unable to keep pace with the body’s endeavors to heal itself.

Enter Lang, who is not only Brecken’s father, but also the leader of the “plastic-eaters” mentioned above. He cannot explain how their body modifications came to manifest naturally in a new generation beyond referring to the boy as their “miracle child,” but approaches Saul and Caprice with the idea of performing a public autopsy on his son’s body “to show the world that the future of humanity existed and was good–was at peace and harmony with the techno world that we’ve created.”

Saul accepts under orders from his handler in the government’s New Vice Unit, which unbeknownst even to Caprice he works for as an undercover agent, ostensibly to earn Lang’s trust so that he can infiltrate his group, but really because they’ve already gotten to Brecken’s body:

Meanwhile, LifeFormWare is making plans of its own to ensure the continued viability of its products:

Crimes of the Future is also quite erotic, to the point where the album Pinkerton by Weezer could almost function as an alternative soundtrack to it, especially the tracks “Tired of Sex,” which matches well with this awkward encounter between Saul and Timlin:

“The Good Life,” which might as well be all about him, and “Butterfly,” our new accompaniment to the end titles that follow this brilliant final image:

Speaking of which, many critics identify it as a reference to my February, 2023 Drink & a Movie selection The Passion of Joan of Arc, but it also marks the conclusion of a motif that started with the 14th and 15th screengrabs in this post by putting a new twist on it. Djuna and Lang both weep for things lost, in her case the familiar world she knew in her youth, and in his the unexpected delay of long-anticipated future he thought had already arrived. Saul’s tear, on the other hand, is like Joan’s a sign of acceptance. Caprice gives him a bite of Lang’s “modern food”:

The Breakfaster Chair stops moving:

And to paraphrase a different set of alternative rockers active in the 90s, it’s the end of the world as we know it–but he feels fine. To Bahadur, “Cronenberg’s deep fear here – as it should be to all of us – is of reactionaryism: that those who are deemed different are then deemed subhuman, if not human at all. The title is in reference to this alone: is difference or the new the crime of the future? Is it already the crime of the now?” Noel Vera similarly suggests in a blog post about Crimes that by the end for Saul “the coming apocalypse isn’t so much a calamity as a fascinating new condition to explore and exploit, even embrace.” He also observes in passing that his name might be a reference to Alfred Bester’s classic sci fi novel The Demolished Man, something that occurred to me as well, specifically this nonsense rhyme that Ben Reich learns to prevent his thoughts from being read in a future where telepathy is common:

 Eight, sir; seven, sir;
 Six, sir; five, sir;
 Four, sir; three, sir;
 Two, sir; one!
 Tenser, said the Tensor.
 Tenser, said the Tensor.
 Tension, apprehension,
 And dissension have begun.

What’s interesting is the way that story ends. It revolves around Reich’s attempts to commit the perfect crime and escape his world’s worst punishment, something with the threatening name of “Demolition.” But it’s not what we think it is, as we finally discover in the final pages:

Reich squalled and twitched.

“How’s the treatment coming?”

“Wonderful. He’s got the stamina to take anything. We’re stepping him up. Ought to be ready for rebirth in a year.”

“I’m waiting for it. We need men like Reich. It would have been a shame to lose him.”

“Lose him? How’s that possible? You think a little fall like that could–“

“No, I mean something else. Three or four hundred years ago, cops used to catch people like Reich just to kill them. Capital punishment, they called it.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Scout’s honor.”

“But it doesn’t make sense. If a man’s got the talent and guts to buck society, he’s obviously above average. You want to hold on to him. You straighten him out and turn him into a plus value. Why throw him away? Do that enough and all you’ve got left are the sheep.”

“I don’t know. Maybe in those days they wanted sheep.”

Harowitz & Silverman argue that a big part of what makes the Caesar a great drink is that it’s infinitely customizable: they define it as “a cocktail (alcoholic or non-alcoholic) made with a base of vegetable juice and an element of the sea.” It thus can be adapted to almost any dietary preference or restriction, so mix yourself up a Watermelon like we recommend or try something different: whether you do or don’t drink, are an omnivore or vegetarian, or even (judging from Crimes‘ first line) eat plastic, Caesar Country is your roadmap to a satisfying Canada Day concoction.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.

You’d never know it from this monthly series, but My Loving Wife and I aren’t drinking as much as we used to, and the most common way I discover new cocktails these days is by trying to find novel uses for old bottles which have been languishing in our liquor cabinet and refrigerator for far too long. And so it was that I found myself mixing up The Navigator which Frederic Yarm featured on his blog in 2018 earlier this year with some of the madeira I purchase each December to make bigos, a nod to both my upbringing in Pennsylvania Dutch country where we eat pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s day for good luck and the two years of Polish I took in college. When it proved to be a perfect platform for not just that spirit, but two other household favorites, Bacardí Reserva Ocho and Rothman & Winter’s Orchard Apricot Liqueur, I immediately decided to feature it in one of my last remaining Drink & a Movie posts. Here’s how to make it:

1 oz. Bacardí Reserva Ocho
1 oz. Rainwater Madeira (Leacock’s)
3/4 oz. Lemon juice
1/2 oz. Simple syrup
1/4 oz. Apricot liqueur (Rothman & Winter)

Combine all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with an edible orchid and a lemon twist.

Punch provided a great overview of rainwater Madeira in 2017 for their “Bringing It Back Bar” series. Once considered the most prestigious style in the category in United States, it emerged from Prohibition with a debased reputation but has recently found favor with bartenders who find it “attractive not only for its relatively low price point, but for its subtlety.” It functions in The Navigator the same way as it does in the recipes linked to in that article–as a medium-dry counterpoint to the apricot liqueur and rum, resulting in an easy-drinking concoction which is sweet, but subtle instead of cloying. That’s actually not a terrible way to describe the movie I’m pairing it with, The Strange Case of Angelica, which like Madeira and The Navigator’s presumptive namesake Prince Henry hails from Portugal. Here’s a picture of my Cinema Guild DVD copy:

It’s also available for rental or purchase on Apple TV+, and some people (including current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students) may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

Director Manoel de Oliveira was 101 years old and had 30 features under his belt when The Strange Case of Angelica debuted at Cannes in 2010, and it has a stately mien and pacing befitting such a remarkable resume. The film begins with an epigraph by Antero de Quental: “yonder, lily of celestial valleys, your end shall be their beginning, our loves ne’er more to perish.” This is followed by two languorous minutes of titles accompanied by Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires performing the third movement of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 3 in Bi Minor which unspool over a nighttime cityscape of Régua from a vantage point across the Douro River:

The action begins with a 3:30 single take street scene also shot with a stationary camera and featuring a “strongly diagonal” (per James Quandt on the DVD commentary track) composition that will accrete significance as the movie progresses. A man inquires as to the whereabouts of the photographer who lives above the shop is car has stopped in front of:

And is told that he’s out of town, but a passerby helpfully offers directions to the home of a young “Sephardi emigrant” he knows who “takes photos all over the place.” This turns out to be Isaac (Oliveira’s grandson Ricardo Trêpa), who we meet bent over a malfunctioning wireless in what J. Hoberman identifies as a reference to Jean Cocteau’s Orphée in an essay collected in his book Film After Film:

Unable to make the “static-garbled radio transmissions” any clearer, Isaac shoves the device forward in frustration, knocking a pile of books onto the floor. When one volume falls open to this page:

He picks it up and begins to read. “Dance! O stars, that in constant dizzying heights you follow unchanging. Exalt, and escape for an instant the path that you are chained to.” Suddenly, there’s a knock at the door.

“It’s the angel!” Isaac exclaims and returns to the book. “Time, stand still, and you, former beings, who roam fantastical, celestial ways. Angels, open the gates of heaven, for in my night is day, and in me is God.” As he finishes the passage, there’s another knock, now accompanied by a voice calling his name. Shaken at last from his reverie, Isaac puts the book down and answers the door to find that it’s his landlady Madam Justina (Adelaide Teixeira), who Quandt describes as “like a kind of one-woman Greek chorus,” bearing a message that he has been summoned by a “very important lady” to take pictures of her daughter.

Upon arrival Isaac is greeted outside at the foot of a staircase by a nun (Sara Carinhas) who turns out to be the sister of the woman he is there to photograph (Pilar López de Ayala) and her maid (Isabel Ruth).

They inform him that his subject Angelica has just passed and that his commission is to create “one last souvenir, even if it is very sad” at the behest of her mother. Isaac asks for a stronger bulb for the room’s only light, which Hajnal Király characterizes as “a historical memento of the Oliveira family, owners, at the beginning of the twentieth century, of a factory manufacturing electric devices” in her book The Cinema of Manoel De Oliveira:

Then sets to work in a photo shoot depicted through a combination of long shots of Isaac:

And point-of-view shots complete with frame lines showing us exactly what he’s looking at as he focuses his camera:

He moves in for a close-up:

When suddenly Angelica appears to open her eyes and smile at him:

He is obviously shocked:

But upon realizing that no one else has noticed anything strange hastily finishes up and departs. The next day as he’s developing the pictures he took, an image of Angelica again comes to life, causing him to once more jump back in surprise:

Moments later he spies some laborers tilling the soil in a vineyard across the river:

And resolves the photograph them, much to the chagrin of Madam Justina, who laments the fact that “hardly anyone works like that these days”:

As Quandt notes, “Oliveira’s materialist appreciation of sound is wonderfully apparent” in the sequence that follows, which features more slanted lines:

And a charming call-and-response working song about a shabby suit of clothes. It ends with Isaac appearing to hear bells calling mourners to Angelica’s funeral, for he next appears in the church where one of the friends gathered around her coffin comments that “she looks like an angel from heaven”:

Which inspires him to recite the snippet of poetry he read earlier. That night in a scene which begins with what we soon realize is a shot of his reflection in a mirror, Isaac wakes up and walks over the photos hanging on a line in front of his balcony:

As he stands there an apparition materializes behind him:

He passes through the doorway and becomes translucent himself. The two of them embrace and rise into the sky:

Leading forthwith to my favorite image from this movie, the epically goofy grin plastered on Isaac’s face as he floats supine through the air:

Which he wears right up until the moment when a strikingly topographical overhead shot of the Douro abruptly gives way to one of him in freefall:

He awakens the next morning with a start and lights a cigarette:

“That strange reality . . . perhaps it was just a hallucination? But it was just as real as this. Could I have been to that place of absolute love I’ve heard about?” Then: “I must be out of my mind.” The second half of the film chronicles his self-deportation from the land of the living, which Daniel Kasman read as reminiscent of the director of my September, 2024 Drink & a Movie selection History is Made at Night in a dispatch filed from Cannes 2010: “as in Borzage, escape from the world’s ails to the bliss of an otherworldly love is at once the most cowardly and most heroic of actions.” As part of The Strange Case of Angelica‘s very first wave of viewers, Kasman understandably focuses specifically on the titular character’s role in precipitating Isaac’s withdrawal from his fellow lodgers:

Growing frustration when Angelica remains tantalizingly out of reach even in his dreams::

And increasingly public erratic behavior:

But as Rita Benis notes in a paper collected in the book Fearful Symmetries called “The Abysses of Passion in Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica,” the film’s fantastical elements like Isaac’s visions of Angelica are strongly linked to its realist sequences like his efforts to document the “old-fashioned” ways of the vineyard workers visible from his apartment and “their contrast is what generates the real fear implicit in the film,” such as in “the distressing sequence where he desperately follows a tractor working the rocky soil, taking furious snapshots to the fading traces of an ancient world (the connection between man and earth)”:

These shots are, of course, immediately followed by one of him thrashing around in his bed, haunted by the sounds of hoes striking the earth over and over again, and they finally unlock the secret to all those diagonals: each of Isaac’s impossible loves are a step on what is ultimately one long stairway to heaven.

J. Hoberman closes his essay on The Strange Case of Angelica with a quote:

The last living filmmaker born during the age of the nickelodeon, Oliveira told an interviewer that cinema today is “the same as it was for Lumiére, for Méliès and Max Linder. There you have realism, the fantastic, and the comic. There’s nothing more to add to that, absolutely nothing.” The great beauty of this love song to the medium is that Oliveira’s eschewal remains absolute. It’s a strange case–pictures move and time stands still.

The other night at dinner we went around the table at the request of my children and all said what we’d eat if we had to subsist on just one food for the rest of our lives. Neither Oliveira’s film nor The Navigator may be the most daringly innovative creation featured in this series, but they both contain everything I’m looking for in a drink and a movie respectively, and while it would be suboptimal (to say the least) to be confined to such a limited diet, I can think of far worse answers to the cinema and cocktail versions of my kids’ question!

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.