January 2009 - Horrorphile

Horrorphile

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Horrorphile - January 2009

Tales of Ordinary Madness

January 30th 2009 04:14

“Los Angeles. People call it Lost Angels. Me? I was just another one of the lost back where I belonged, back in L.A. I could’ve kissed the ground, but I resisted the impulse, besides it was drink I craved and I had to get back to my part of town: Hollywood. Everybody thinks it’s the playground of the stars, but they pushed on years ago. Now it’s my kind of place, dangerous; the hardcore turf of pimps, whores, no-class rip-off artists and other shattered types entertaining fantasies to desperate to mention, just naked reality twenty-four hours a day. I’ve always had a love affair with the streets.”

Italian agent provocateur Marco (La Grande Bouffe) Ferreri’s powerfully desolate adaptation (along with screenwriter Sergio Amidei) of Charles Bukowski’s collection of short stories Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness is something to behold; like a cracked bottle of vintage wine half-empty with the sediment stuck to the side of the glass, its ugly blue-green beauty mesmerising in the cold vermilion of dawn.

Ben Gazzara as Charles Serking

Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981) is arguably the most affecting feature capturing that infamous street poet and novelist’s work. A couple of Hollywood movies; Barfly, with Mickey Rourke as Bukowski, and Factotum, with Matt Dillon as Bukoswki, try too hard. There’s a third notable indie movie, Love is a Dog From Hell (aka Crazy Love), which covers Bukowski as an acne-scarred boy searching desperately for affection.

Ornella Muti as Cass

Actually, the late great Bukowski was forever searching desperately for affection. He usually found it in a bottle of whisky or a can of beer or a gallon of wine. It was then while he was pissed (which was a large proportion of the time) that he would wax lyrical about the grotesque beauty of the world, about the tribulations of carnal desire, about the trials of having to earn a dollar. Bukowski had a nihilistic edge to his lifestyle, yet he always had a dog-eared get-out-of-jail-free card stashed in his back pocket (and a hipflask in the other).

Tales of Ordinary Madness Ben Gazzara and Tanya Lopert

Charles is hassled by Vicky (Tanya Lopert)

Ben Gazzara plays Charles Serking (read: Bukowski) with grizzled beard and voice to match. The movie is a series of episodes where we watch with quiet fascination as he trundles around the squalor and broken-down civilisation that is the city of lost angels. He lays lost souls with the same curious ease as he somehow manages to afford the next bottle of booze; there’s the nameless teenage runaway (Wendy Welles) in the back room of a decrepit concert hall where he’s just given a brief poetry reading, then there’s the psycho-dramatic street urchin Vera (Susan Tyrell) whom he follows off Venice Beach like a mutt traipsing after a bitch in heat (who later calls the cops on his opportunistic ass), then there’s the obese and gross widow (Judith Drake) who spreads her poached legs so Charles can attempt to return to the womb.

Tales of Ordinary Madness Ben Gazzara and Judith Drake

Charles seeks wine and women, and finds a widow (Judith Drake)

There's his ex-wife Vicky (Tanya Lopert), who lives in the adjacent bed-sit and is sick and tired of his loose rent. And then there’s Cass (the incomparable Ornella Muti), the exotically beautiful whore who slinks beside him at the bar and smiles with silken seduction, drawing him into her self-destructive whirlpool of smoldering love (“Now give it to me, take my soul with your cock”). It is Cass whom Charles can’t get enough of, yet he knows deep in the pit of his ulcerous gut that he needs to come up for air. For Cass, the rejection only fuels her strange nihilism, and her penchant for ghastly self-mutilation.

Tales of Ordinary Madness Ben Gazzara and Ornella Muti

The way Ferreri directs, often in long shot or with long takes, adds a haunting ethereal beauty, especially in the scenes on the beaches where the rippling, sandy desolation mirrors Serking’s inner turmoil. He claims he had a desire to be unknown, unwanted and unnoticed, that he wasn’t interested in chasing the American wet dream, but instead only wished to get drunk, and yet there is a profound sadness to his sozzled vision. He’s a lonely man with a gift for words and phrases, observations and insights, who can’t pull himself out of the perpetual rut that he insists is his bedfellow.

“Ever hear the sound of one mouth screaming? I had for years: my own. I didn’t want to go home, I didn’t wanna see anybody. I just needed to be invisible for a few days to get down in the dirt, lose myself with all the others; the defeated, the demented, and the damned. They’re the real people of this world and I was proud to be in their company.”

Cass in one of her more extreme moments

Despite Serking’s inherently pathetic character and behavioral traits, Gazzara imbues them with a kind of endearing tragedy. The entire movie glows with this sense of tragedy; a washed-out sheen like a polluted Lost Angels’ sunset seen through the plastic lenses of a pair of scratched five-dollar shades. Tales of Ordinary Madness shines darkly, lying in the gutter and gazing up at the lonely moon.

I might be stretching it a little by including this peculiar piece of bourbon-soaked navel-gazing amidst my pantheon of nightmares, but Tales of Ordinary Madness is an urban dream of troublesome inadequacy, and it reflects a gritty portrait of subdued insanity; the craziness that comes with wanting it all, but not giving a fuck. Beat-poet completists watch for William Burroughs quietly drinking at the bar about an hour in.

Charles and the brunette (Katya Berger)

Perhaps the movie – and to a degree the whole of Bukowski’s oeuvre – is best summed up in the movie’s final scenes on the stretching sand of Venice Beach where Charles Serking, drunk and befuddled, has met another lost soul, a young brunette (Katya Berger) who watches him from afar, then asks what is poetry? Charles promises to compose something especially for her if she treats him to her titties. She dashes off, dancing around the lagoon, and then after Charles recites something from deep within his wounded, scarred soul, she peels off her blouse and skirt, her pale flesh blending with the white sand, and Charles clings to her, his face buried in her soft belly, the sea breeze mingling with the taste of her salty skin …

Unfortunately I couldn't find the trailer or any clips from the movie, so he's the real Charles Bukowski lamenting on the lack of decent poetry in the world:

Tales of Ordinary Madness DVD (which also features a short doco on the films of Marco Ferreri) is courtesy of Umbrella Entertainment, many thanks!