Sibling Incest

The Cement Garden

Based more or less faithfully on the novel by Ian McEwan,

A family of four children is orphaned, and they decide to encase their late mother in concrete in the basement rather than be taken into custody by child welfare services.

Directed by Andrew Birkin, with Andrew Robertson, Charlotte Gainsbourg ,
Alice Coulthard, Ned Birkin, and Sinéad Cusac.

When their parents die of natural causes a family of two children and two teens decides to handle the situation themselves and not involve the authorities. After entombing their mother in the basement, the younger brother embarks upon an exploration of transvestism as the older brother and sister begin a steamy, tempestuous incestuous relationship. Matters become complicated when the girl invites a dapper stranger into the fold who smells a rat and isn't as liberal in his values as he portends to be.

This is an offbeat, atmosphere piece with more of a dream-like storyline than a focused and clear plot. The protagonists puzzle us by not taking obvious precautions. The result is a slightly surreal odyssey about unusual family values and the exploration of taboos.

"I was just playing a game ... Does it seem unnatural to you?"

Lone Star

Lone Star (1996)
Written and Directed by John Sayles.
With Kris Kristofferson, Elizabeth Peña, and Stephen Mendillo.
Genre: Drama/Mystery.

Sheriff Sam Deeds (Cooper) follows in his father's wake as the police chief of a quiet border community. When he learns that an old skeleton and lawman's badge have been unearthed outside of town, it appears that they may belong to his father's predecessor, and that his father could also be the dead man's killer. Deeds' investigation leads to the disinterment of some other long-buried secrets that nobody is prepared to face, least of all himself.

Lone Star starts out looking for all the world like it will be an intriguing mystery. Then it appears to use the mystery premise as a device to tell four tales about love, racial hypocrisy, ethnic bias, the evils of prejudice, etc. -which is to say it seems preachy. It appears to go down the road of being an essay, or survey of controversial issues, and a rather shallow one at that. This made me almost give up on it. I think I have enough judgment to know right from wrong without being continually proselytized by the mass media on these subjects. Did I ever underestimate writer/director John Sayles.

Lone Star is going somewhere with all of this. Once the aforementioned topics are introduced, the observations made about them are rather sharp. They are representative without being judgmental. Toward the latter part of the film the viewer will start to get an inkling that the writer is making a more important point altogether. Without giving that purpose away, let me make an observation, prefaced by couple of real life examples.

G. Gordon Liddy in his autobiography Will writes about Gary, Indiana during the 1950's and early''60's. The town had a lot of crime, but most of it was victimless. Vice was heavily regulated, which is to say that it was condoned and controlled in such a way that peripheral crime associated with it was minimized. Everyone made a profit, and most of the residents were allegedly content with how the town was run. Until Bobby Kennedy became Attorney General and interfered, Gary was, according to Liddy, "The little town that worked."

My other example is the alleged intertwining between the US government and organized crime shockingly illustrated in a book called Double Crossed by Michael Corbitt and Sam Ginacana, nephew to the Chicago crime syndicate boss. Do to fortuitous timing, I had just read both books before seeing Lone Star.

Lone Star does not turn out to be the politically correct sermon on the evils of racism and class differences that it prima facie appears to be.
Rather, in the spirit of the two examples above, it explores how the often illicit game of "Let's Make A Deal" transcends such surface boundaries as race, nationality, class issues and the law. Not only is Lone Star about one such "little town that works," it is about the intricacies and machinations of such a transcendence.

Additionally, the mystery premise that ties the entire piece together turns out to be quite clever and interesting. When the bombshell is dropped on the audience at the end, it is very revealing of real-life operational business principles while it bundles together all of the film's vignettes and themes. It also packs a charged punch in terms of a very heavy revelation that is thrown onto the film's two central characters. This revelation is staggering and emotional without being so on purpose in any sort of manipulative way.

Lone Star is a thinking man's drama, not in the sense that it is slow, but because it has so much to say, and leaves one a bit stunned with its literary plot ramifications, In other words, it provides the viewer with a lot to think about at once, all of which hits the audience in the last five minutes. The ending is very delightfully perverse, twisted and disturbing. If one is looking for the sensationalism of an action movie, he may think that Lone Star is a slow-paced mystery and give up on it, Lone Star is so much more. It packs all of the tension of an action movie into the cerebral equivalent of a lead slug fired from a shotgun.

The film steadily creeps along its inexorable path like a burning fuse, lulling the beholder into believing that he holds a sense of insight. The fuse, it turns out, is attached to a cherry bomb in the theater patron's seat which delivers an unexpected and unrivaled kick to the ass.

Lone Star - trailer

FIVE STARS to the UNEDITED version.