COMICS IN FILM: LOLA (1961), DIRECTED BY JACQUES DEMY

Comics in Film: Lola (1961), directed by Jacques Demy.

French schoolgirl Cecile and American sailor Frankie discuss the idea of a “mysterious planet” from Meteor, a monthly science fiction comics magazine that features the long-running bande dessinée “Les Conquérants de l'Espace” by cartoonist Raoul Giordan and writer Robert Lortac. In this scene, Cecile has been sent to get a few groceries by her mother with the incentive of also picking up the latest issue of her favourite comic. Frankie has bought the last copy, but charitably gives it to her, and the two form a brief friendship. Cecile is on the cusp of her 14th birthday and has a teenage crush on Frankie, on leave from his U.S. Navy ship but almost finished his tour of duty and on the verge of returning to his exotic far-away home of Chicago, Illinois. Set in the port city of Nantes, Lola is a beautiful film about arrested adolescence and liminality, with people always on the threshold of departure and change, all wrapped up in myths of romance, escape, travel, coincidence, circularity, movement, ritual, repetition, nostalgia, impermanence, death, rebirth, transformative space, and reinvention. 

 

VINYL + TURNTABLES IN FILM: PERFECT DAYS

Perfect Days (2023), directed by Wim Wenders.

Professional toilet cleaner Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) listens to his collection of classic cassette tapes while driving in his van to work and in his meticulously clean home on a small ghetto blaster. His feckless young co-worker Takashi (Tokio Emoto) takes him to a record store (Tokyo’s Flash Disc Ranch) to get a valuation on some of his tapes, including Lou Reed’s Transformer which the record store clerk describes as rare. Hiragana refuses to sell, and instead gives Akashi some cash so he can impress a woman. Earlier, Takashi had introduced Hirayama to his girlfriend Aya (Aoi Yamada), who borrows Hirayama’s cassette of Patti Smith’s Horses after she hears the track “Redondo Beach.” This music, mostly meticulously-curated English-language classic rock from the 1960s and 70s, and Hirayama’s use of outdated, mostly analog tech, is central to the themes of Perfect Days, a film that fetishizes and nostalgizes certain outmoded aspects of Japanese working class life and celebrates a zen-like approach to living simply, seemingly outside of history, presented without comment or curiosity, although sometimes contrasted with images of industrial ugliness and social anomie and alienation. It’s a beautiful film, filled with many moving scenes and images, paired perfectly with some of my favourite music that actually had me crying like a little baby at key moments.

Comics in Film: Our Man in Havana (1958)

 

Comics in Film: Our Man in Havana (1958).

by BK Munn

Vacuum cleaner salesman James Wormold (Alec Guinness) is inspired by the fictional comic strip "Rock Kent" to claim one of his non-existent agents, a pilot, has been killed. Wormold has been randomly recruited by the British Government to create a spy network in Cuba, but having neither the inclination or imagination for espionage, he simply makes up the network based on items he stumbles across and submits false reports to his superiors. Thus, a list of members at his country club becomes the spy network, the design of a vacuum cleaner becomes the model for a drawing of a secret weapon installation, and this comic strip becomes the explanation for why he can't provide actual photos to London. Unfortunately the plan backfires, and the Cuban police kill a real pilot after intercepting his coded message, dictated here to his secretary Beatrice (Maureen O'Hara). "Rock Kent" is meant to be similar to other Cold War aviation strips of the period like "Buzz Sawyer" and "Steve Canyon." The Havana Post was a real newspaper and you can see the top of Blondie, a real comic, in one of the close-ups. The bar location was real, too: it was actually shot on the streets of Havana right after the Castro Revolution overthrew the corrupt Batista regime, represented in the film by the amorous torturer Captain Segura (Ernie Kovacs), and Castro reportedly visited the set during filming.