A bit of a strange film, this - from a Swedish director whose other credits include “Stop for Bud”, “Porno Shop”, “Wet Dreams”, and “The Situationist Life”. Unsurprisingly, it’s porn with art stylings (or perhaps the other way round).

I’ve never read the novel on which the film’s based, but his other work isn’t exactly lacking in misogyny. In Quiet Days, though, this seems to be used as the base for some hammed-up irony - Joey and Carl moan endlessly about how stupid women are for caring only about fucking while being oblivious to the fact that that’s all they seem to care about themselves.

It’s not a bad film - about 20 minutes of it is forgettable porn (nothing particularly gratuitous [or at all interesting, for that matter]), and the rest is fairly variable melodrama. It has the best title sequence of any film ever, but the rest of it is pretty much what you’d expect from a bunch of media studies students if you locked them in a cupboard for a year with nothing but a copy of “jules et jim” for entertainment, and then asked them to make a film about bored men having sex.

Self-referential postmodernist silliness of this sort really ought to be slappably smug. Fortunately, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman are first-order geniuses, and, christ, it shows - ‘Adaptation’ is a very wonderful film.

It’s a sort-of meta-narrative on ‘Being John Malkovich’ (and both Malkovich and Catherine Keener make appearances), following that film’s screewriter, Charlie Kaufman, as he struggles to overcome writer’s block while working on his next project.

Nicolas Cage plays both Kaufman himself and his fictional brother, Donald - a wastrel of the sort that buys into a different faddish get-rich-quick scheme every month, and who is currently trying to take advantage of his “writer’s genes” by working on a script for an over-egged horror-flick-with-a-twist.

Now, that sounds like it’s the perfect set-up for some nasty, heavy-handed signposting (sorry, SIGNPOSTING!!!!) and masturbatory smugness of the sort that normally makes me want to KILL, but the tricksiness is kept well under control, and the ending is straightforward (perhaps even a little formulaic - but, dammit, that’s a GOOD thing in an otherwise complicated film - and it contrasts well with Donald’s script, “The Three”, which you just *know* has an ending that is SIGNPOSTED!!!! ninety times a fucking minute for the final half hour).

To prove how good Adaptation is, let’s look at one scene, and then consider how it would be handled in a lesser film.

There’s this great wee bit when Charlie is criticising Donald’s “twist”, and their conversaton goes something like this:

Donald: “…but what the audience /don’t/ realise is that both the Killer and the Cop are actually the same person who secretly suffers from a multiple personality disorder!”
Charlie: “aha, so what happens?”
Donald: “well, there’s going to be a chase sequence - all good movies need a chase - and the Killer’s going to be on a motorbike, and the Cop’s going to be on horseback…”
Charlie: “hang on - the cop’s going to be on horseback, chasing the killer - who’s on a motorcycle, but is /actually/ just a facet of the cop’s split personality?”

See, that’s quite nice - there’s text (Donald’s amusing ineptitude), and a couple of layers of subtext, one regarding the text (horror-flicks-with-twists tend to be confused, woolly crap), and another on the meta-narrative (the whole two-characters/one-man thing). Best of all, it’s done in an open, obvious way without pushing any great slab of “meaning” down your throat.

Now, imagine if the same scene had taken place in the most egregiously awful film of the century - Donnie Darko:

Donald: “…but what the audience /don’t/ realise is that both the Killer and the Cop are actually the same person…”
Charlie: “…who turns out to just be dreaming the whole thing - yes, yes! that’s it!”
Donald: “but at the end, maybe it turns out that he, just maybe, wasn’t dreaming! and maybe there really is a Killer on the loose!”
[ An angel from heaven descends, clutching The Highly Significant Trumpet ]
Trumpet: PARP!
Charlie: “And he suspects that that Killer is actually a just facet of his own split personality! It’d be like two different-but-related characters being played by the same person!”
Trumpet: PARP!
Donald: “But he can’t tell anyone ‘cos that’d rid him of his existential angst, which is the only thing keeping the killer in check!”
[ Pretty girl in the background writes “THAT WAS A HIGHLY SIGNIFICANT MOMENT” in small, neat handwriting on the blackboard; the angel re-ascends into the mists; Donald and Charlie stroke chins]
[ Fade to Black ]
[ We see Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal naked, standing in a small, featureless white-walled room. Their nubile, tender flesh is slicked with sweat and they are quite clearly about to perform some sort of incredibly perverted…

er, oh. my imagination’s getting a little carried away there.

so, um. am off for a lay down. yes.