Four Rooms

(Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, USA, 1995)

Cinema of Distractions

When a film goes from being over-hyped in pre-production to being unanimously trashed on its release, I am compelled to seek it out.

Four Rooms was a dream project conjured by a bunch of youngish American filmmakers: Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. In that group, there’s really only one star director: Tarantino – or, as Ellen DeGeneres kept referring to him on her sitcom, Tarantutti.

The other three are all at more or less the same slightly rocky, uncertain, nervous moment in their fledgling careers. They’ve all made first features that garnered modest acclaim and attention. Anders gave us the downbeat teen drama Gas Food Lodging (1992). Rockwell made a rough, whacky comedy about filmmaking, In the Soup (1992). Rodriguez, not exactly a hipster like the others, shot the ultra-low budget feature El Mariachi (1992).

Second time up to bat, however, none of these directors scored as well – and the goodwill initially extended to them by press and by audiences was largely withdrawn. Anders with Mi Vida Loca (1993), Rockwell with Somebody to Love (1994), and most spectacularly Rodriguez with Desperado (1995) – all were intriguing in various ways, but also unsatisfying; they just did not gel on some fundamental levels.

So, all three filmmakers were victims of the dreaded Second Film Syndrome, which will affect, for good or mostly for ill, every young filmmaker in today’s hype-driven market (which includes film festivals). The syndrome in which a modest first film does OK, but then so much unreasonable expectation is loaded onto its successor that it becomes almost impossible to succeed. Tarantino is one of the few newcomers who came out of that gauntlet OK, because his second effort, Pulp Fiction (1994), was substantially better formed and more ambitious than his first, Reservoir Dogs (1992).

Alas, because Tarantino remains the most discussed, idolised and hyped director in the world, the anxiety that comes with Second Film Syndrome simply escalates in his case, transfer to the prospect of his third film – which Tarantino is taking his sweet time delivering. Jane Campion, for her part, found a clever way around the Syndrome by making An Angel at My Table (1990) for television in-between her first cinema feature Sweetie (1989) and her second, The Piano (1993).

So, picture these three filmmakers, Anders, Rockwell and Rodriguez; they cook up a collective idea with Tarantino: let’s have a hotel, and different rooms in the hotel each with different characters and a different story. And let’s have a bellhop who links the stories together and appears in each one. And let’s have a whole bunch of fascinating, eccentric directors creatively in charge of this project.

At this point, the company that has rode to fame on the bandwagon of American Independent cinema, namely Miramax, gets in on the discussion. Miramax doesn’t want just any old group of filmmakers in on the marquee; it wants the young, hip names – it wants the Tarantino Generation! So, Five Rooms, as it was originally envisaged, gets chopped down to Four Rooms; and two filmmakers of an older generation – Paul Bartel and Alan Rudolph – get turfed out. Tarantino himself in fact hesitates about putting himself into the deal, but his pals talk him around; he decides to do it for a lark.

Anthology or compilation movies – where short films by various hands are strung together – are always a very tricky business. In the 1960s, anthology movies had a certain currency in Europe: films structured on the idea of the four seasons, or love at the age of twenty, or Paris as seen by six visionary filmmakers. Italian anthologies of the time had a definite populist appeal. They might be devoted to specific stars: five faces of Silvana Mangano, as in The Witches (1967). Plenty of similar projects have been produced since them, but the form has clearly fallen on hard times. Who’s seen (for example) the complete Seven Women, Seven Sins (1986), with contributors including Chantal Akerman and Bette Gordon? At the Melbourne Film Festival of 1988, we belatedly got only One Deadly Sin from that bunch, Ulrike Ottinger’s marvellous montage trip, Superbia. Other anthologies, such as the “international episode film” City Life (1990) – 240 minutes worth with segments by (among others) Krzysztof Kieślowski, José Luis Guerin and Béla Tarr – are even less visible on the world stage.

Even the best anthologies tend to have a superficial, lightly tripping, hit-and-miss appeal: akin to a parade of circus acts or a variety show, where what you enjoy in part is precisely the fan-like display of different colours, styles and moods in quick succession. Four Rooms completely embraces this lightweight, merry, show-off quality of the anthology form. In fact, it’s the perfect example of a certain tendency in modern cinema much discussed in the annals of serious film criticism: the cinema of attractions.

A detour on this is required. The argument runs that the cinema began precisely as a circus, fairground, music-hall attraction. It was devoted to spectacle, display, exhibitionism; to various kinds of short, sharp, piecemeal effects or shocks to distract and rivet our attention. In those silent cinema days, cinema was very closely aligned with magic tricks, vaudeville comedy, hucksterism – all the most proudly vulgar traditions of showbiz. But at the same time, cinema was wedded to new forms, no less spectacular and gee-whiz in nature – to new technologies of vehicular motion and electric light displays, for instance.

In fact, cinema has never entirely lost touch with these primal attractions – and thank heaven for that, because anybody’s love of this medium is intimately bound up with the pleasure of such sheer spectacle. Every time in film history that there’s a new technological invention – wide screen, Dolby surround sound, new special effects processes, digital animation, whatever it may be – we are plunged into a renewed display of point-of-view camera angles plunging down vast ravines, or assaulted by roaring jet planes and steam engines rumbling the speakers of the theatre. And we get all this not just during the ads or in the THX logo, but in movies themselves, no matter what has to be done to the plot in order to smuggle such attractions into prime place.

On another front, it’s also clear in retrospect that certain popular genres, like musicals and horror movies, have always been resolutely sensational and spectacular – and that is their glory. Cartoons, too, not only spectacular but revelling in their own artifice. And the anthology film itself marks small-scale irruption of the cinema of the attractions at various moments in film history.

The cinema as a medium did change in an overall way as the coming of sound approached at the end of the 1920s. As film historians now suggest, it became more sedate, controlled, seeking ways to hide its tricks and minimse its obvious, vulgar displays. Cinema entered a classical phase, trying to centre more on coherent stories and three-dimensional characters, trying to sustain the integral illusion of fictional worlds. So it started to borrow, in a wholesale manner, narrative structures from respectable forms of literature and theatre. Filmmakers began developing styles that would not be exhibitionistic but invisible, seamless – where the camera and the editing and the music would serve the story, not overpower or fragment it. The classical phase of cinema is synonymous with what we popularly refer to as the Golden Age of Hollywood between roughly 1930 and 1960: 30 years in which directors such as Howard Hawks took classical restraint and discretion in film to its artistic zenith.

You don’t have to be a film historian to know that movies today are not exactly holding to the contract of classicism. We’re in a strange period now, where movies are torn uneasily between two options. On the one hand, filmmakers still want to tell stories – preferably heartwarming, mythic stories like Babe (1995), with characters you can care about, and optimistic messages. On the other hand, movies have been drawn back to that primal lure of the attraction – increasingly jokey and piecemeal, full of spectacle for its own sake and effects of all kinds that scream out to be noticed and admired. Hence the pure virtuosity of style and display in the films of Sam Raimi, the Coen brothers, Terry Gilliam or the French team of Jeunet and Caro (The City of Lost Children, 1995).

And this is only to mention what’s actually on screen; as for everything going on in the foyer and beyond, modern multiplex is surely a throwback to the noisy, hypey, overstimulating atmosphere of the fairground. The attractions offered by cinema now have to compete with the attractions offered by the games arcade, the video monitors and the snack bar. When film fans remember their Good Old Days at the movies, I’m sure they remember a screen experience that was rather more hushed and contemplative, when films were haloed by a certain magical, privileged aura – and audiences didn’t talk loudly all through the movie, since that’s what they’re used to doing in front of the TV at home.

Four Rooms embraces the movement back to a cinema of attractions. It is is a veritable catalogue of every show-off trick, joke or game that you can squeeze into one movie. In Allison Anders’ segment, which opens the film, a coven of witches gathers in one of the rooms to resurrect the lusty spirit of some beautiful, brazen goddess. The cast list for this segment is like the attendance roster at some groovy, film-world party: there’s vampy Madonna, neo-hippy Lili Taylor, feisty teen Alicia Witt (from the TV show Cybill [1995-1998]), Valeria Golino for the necessary exotic Italian hot-blood touch, and Ione Skye (daughter of ex-star of the ‘60s, Donovan). Each of them, in a characteristic showbiz flourish, is introduced separately as they arrive at the hotel.

When Kiva (Witt) asks Elspeth (Madonna), “Why are you sleeping with me?”, the screen image twists into a big question mark, like an old episode of TV’s Batman. On top of all the posing and topless dancing and lurid art direction that goes on in this makeshift witches den, there’s also wildly over-the-top, loud, whacky music, blaring its way through the entire film: an unholy, kitsch combination of fairground tunes, elevator muzak and old TV ad jingles. It hammers and toots like crazy, underlining every single gesture, smirk, slap or raised eyebrow performed (very broadly) by the actors. It’s cartoon music.

And, speaking of broad performances, there’s Tim Roth as the bellhop: an excruciating spectacle. Some have compared him to Jerry Lewis (who was, once upon a time, The Bellboy [1960]), but Roth is more like a horrible corruption of John Cleese: his acting is all funny walks, grotesque facial twitches and high-pitched, exasperated squeals. You find yourself inevitably wishing he will, somehow, be shot.

The first two segments of Four Rooms are not good. The witch story builds slowly and then just ends, vanishing in mid-air. The second, by Alexandre Rockwell, is the worst of the lot. The bellhop stumbles in on an S&M power game being played out between a violent man (David Proval) and the female companion (Jennifer Beals) he has tied to a chair. There’s no clarity, no thrill, and no twist to the way Rockwell plays out this tableau.

However, his segment does add to the film’s inventory of cinematic attractions some strenuous visual devices that Anders was perhaps shy about using. So now there’s slow motion; exaggerated, booming, echoey sound effects keyed to the slightest noise; and the camera racing hell for leather right up to faces and objects. This is the type of high-key expressionism introduced to American narrative film by the Coen brothers, and I’m beginning to hate them for it.

Strangely, when we get to the final room and the fourth story, signed by Tarantino, most of these cartoonish, expressionistic devices on both the image- and sound-track abruptly disappear. The effect is very flat. Tarantino is not much of a stylist. His talents are in writing, especially of dialogue, and in his clearly energetic rapport with actors. The camerawork in his features tends to simple, wide-angle compositions: actors in the centre of the frame with plenty of room to move, and the editing cutting back and forth between faces to catch the volleys of the dialogue.

The storyline lazily replays a famous old episode of Alfred Hitchcock’s TV show: a guy bets that if he can’t ignite his lighter ten times in a row, someone can chop off his finger. The acting here is not so hot, and that’s because Tarantino himself is the star – and he’ll never be a great actor. Mostly, he amuses himself, as director, on the visual level by abandoning his usual straight style and going for odd shots where people talk straight into the camera or enter the frame at odd, mysterious angles.

There’s one room I haven’t mentioned yet, and that’s Robert Rodriguez’s segment. This is, thankfully, a good and funny episode. I cannot truthfully claim it is (as the cliché goes) worth the price of admission, but it may be worth checking out again down the line. “The Misbehavers” concerns two little kids, a boy and girl, left alone by their fearsome father (Antonio Banderas, who is terrific). I have a soft spot for Rodriguez, precisely because he isn’t (yet) inner-city hip like his comrades, and his films are not shambling, downbeat and ironic. They have, instead, an uncool, manic, adolescent energy.

In all, it’s a superbly constructed piece of physical burlesque, building to a marvellous gag pay-off. The way it plays on small, recurring details – like the smell that bothers all the characters, and the goofy facial reactions of the kids – is infectious. Rodriguez buzzes the cartoonish stuff with camera and editing, but in a satisfying way. And even Roth is almost bearable in the context of this episode.

It should be well and truly obvious by now that, taken as a whole, I didn’t exactly like Four Rooms. But I didn’t completely hate it, either. And that’s because I stand up, on principle, for the cinema of attractions: this exhibitionistic, noisy, cartoonish cinema which is too often dismissed in favour of those classical literary and theatrical values that simply do not, and should not, hold absolute sway over our art or culture.

I don’t say that classicism is dead, but I do say: send in the clowns! And I am hoping to find an attraction that’s more fun, all up, than Four Rooms.

MORE anthologies: The Blues, Fallen Angels, Inside Out, Lumiere and Company, Strangers, Tales from the Darkside Vol.1, Wild Palms, Dark Whispers: Volume 1, Aria

MORE Rodriguez: Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Spy Kids, Spy Kids 3D, Sin City, From Dusk till Dawn

MORE Tarantino: Jackie Brown, Kill Bill – Vol. 1, Kill Bill – Vol. 2, Inglourious Basterds, Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood

© Adrian Martin April 1996