Sunday, 17 March 2019
4 p.m. at the Earl Cameron Theatre, City Hall
Dir.: Nic Fforde
Runtime: 15:08
If yesterday’s episode of Days of Our Lives were filmed like a cigarette advert from 1971, the result would be Ralph Styles Ultra: a hypnotic send-up of cigarette commercials that by the 5-minute mark becomes a tautological nightmare. Having watched about 600 films during the pre-screening process, I can honestly say that there was nothing else like Ralph Styles Ultra. It is totally unique, and that is why it has been included in our Programmer’s Choice selection.
I had the fortune of speaking not only with writer & director Nic Fforde, but also writer & producer Giulia Watson, who helped me to understand the origins of this cryptic project.
The John Player Special Cigarettes (JPSC) advertisement on which Ralph Styles Ultra is based is 1 minute and 1 second long: A car pulls up outside a mansion. Inside the mansion, a man wearing a tuxedo gives a woman wearing an expensive dress a cigarette. But not just any cigarette – a JPS cigarette. All of this is underpinned by a baritone voiceover (it could be Orson Welles, actually) describing how great JPSCs are. After this, the man and the woman sit on a couch. A projector comes out of the wall (they can afford it, I guess). As they smoke their JPSCs, they watch a film of a car pulling up outside of a mansion – wait, hold on a second…
Are they watching their own advertisement? In the film within the film, is the same couple watching a film of themselves, which we (3 layers back...) are also watching?
I could do this all day. But it is this periphrastic nature that Fforde and Watson execute so brilliantly in Ralph Styles Ultra.
‘The first iteration of the advert,’ Nic notes about the JPS original, ‘is when she smokes a cigarette, there’s a big zoom in, and the music swells up. And she’s transformed by the cigarette into the acquiescent actor that she is supposed to be.’
This, again, is mirrored in Ralph Styles Ultra. The editing by John Smith A.C.E. and cinematography by Richard Dunton evoke a stylistic control in which the camera stays on the actor’s face for just a little bit too long, and the frame is composed so that there is only ever the suggestion of depth. There is, always, a creepy flatness to the visuals and the performances, ‘a bubbling weirdness underneath,’ as Giulia Watson says.
But looking at that JPS commercial now, it is a bit silly.
‘It’s hard not to look at that advert and see how it acts as satire,’ Nic continues, ‘ready-made satire. And so it’s very easy to deconstruct. That was my initial reaction. I just started to deconstruct it automatically.’
Both the original and the Ralph Styles Ultra parody are films made in the detail. But these details are always crystal clear and present like carbon emissions.
The idea for the film came from Nic Fforde watching cigarette advertisements on YouTube (As you do). He would go over to Giulia’s house and discuss the script; the sexual politics. The unapologetic nature of a 70s sales pitch. The veneer of glamour. The lack of a veneer over that veneer. Everything’s on the chin, it seems. But the silliness, also, which is something they agreed on: the ridiculousness of a sincerity that managed at the same time to be insincerity. They’re cigarettes. They’ll kill you. But these cigarettes are equivalent to this beautiful watch I’m wearing right now. That’s right. Silly.
I can picture Nic and Giulia plundering YouTube for cigarette commercials for days, weeks, months—After each one they turn to one another, and corroborate that what they just witnessed was a little weird and a little creepy. The weirdness (bubble, bubble). And casual misogyny in said commercials. Imbued with it. All of them. But the Weinstein/#MeToo scandal(s) only made the news during the filming of Ralph Styles Ultra.
(Note: the R.S.U. Production Team made a deal with a cocktail bar: they could film from 7:00 a.m. onwards as long as they were out of the building by 3:00 p.m. This meant that filming ceased at 2:00 p.m. at the latest. Realistically, cinematographer Richard Dunton only had 4-5 hours to make the movie look as good as it does.)
Much like a cigarette commercial from 1971, the open secrets of an entertainment underworld were suddenly outside the outside. They were in the open, outside of the exterior where they originally festered: I wonder what Jacques Derrida would have made of the #MeToo movement…?
Ready-made satire. So ridiculously, appallingly misogynistic and awful that it eventually (or can) come off as plain stupid: a senseless, mutton-headed reality. And one cannot help but recognize the appeal in parodying said reality. Laughter is (or can be) the by-product of parody. But the real satirization of a subject is an incision, followed by a full dissection. This can be a little weird, and a little creepy. But it’s meant to be.
When I ask Nic Fforde what he thought the reaction to Ralph Styles Ultra would be, he replies, ‘I’m not sure.’
Giulia jumps in: ‘I didn’t think we expected the cinema audiences we’ve seen to laugh as much as they did. And obviously that’s amazing, but I don’t think that we expected it to be reacted to as laugh-out-loud—’
‘I thought they’d be a little freaked out by it,’ Nic adds with a modicum of relish, 'I think some people were, actually.’
‘Or confused,’ Giulia suggests, “like, ‘What did I just see?’ were some of the reactions. I think that’s part of what we expected, and almost hoped for: if people walked out and they were like ‘Waaahh—?’ hopefully, in a positive way, then we’ve done a good job.’
Fforde was deeply worried (a la every filmmaker during a premier: I believe, ‘shi**ing myself,’ was the term used…) before Ralph Styles Ultra’s premier at the HollyShorts Film Festival in Los Angeles. There he was, I imagine (the key word, here), pacing up and down the lobby in a tuxedo, a festival pass dangling from his neck. Then Giulia comes over in an expensive dress. She tells him to relax and that, sometimes, something extraordinary happens. Something special. He should smoke John Player Special Cigarettes, the very best in Virginia Tobacco...(Don't worry. We won't pursue this.). She says she doesn’t think the audience will laugh too much, like, maybe a bit, but on the whole she doesn’t know what to expect. This doesn’t make Nic feel any better (Or Giulia, for that matter). So now they’re both pacing up and down the lobby. Then they hear another pair of filmmakers in the corner arguing about Bernie Sanders running for president. Again. Like, what the hell, the guy’s 77. Man’s an animal. That doesn’t matter, but still, as you can see, it’s all happening here in this alarming room. Later, Fforde and Watson go into the cinema for the premier. They sit through all the other short films, all of which (because I don’t want obscene emails from either party) they enjoy thoroughly, and totally.
Back to reality, now: ‘It was pretty awesome,’ Nic said of the HollyShorts premier, ‘people were giggling.’
‘Cuz then,’ I reply, “you’re like, ‘Yea, it’s okay. It’s fine.’”
‘Exactly,’ Nic continues, smiling, ‘we worried it was a bit niche. It was a bit too 70s, or something.’ And the rest is history.
I think, ultimately, that Ralph Styles Ultra is a crowd-pleasing film because it defies criticism in a really meaningful way. Much like silent cinema, it is transcendent, and borderless like a loose photograph. Although Nic Fforde and Giulia Watson are unable to attend the festival, we agreed on two things (we agreed on other things, but these two things are particularly important…):
Firstly, that films like The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Coen Bros., 2017) are an example of how short films can reach a wider audience. ‘There’s a kind of red thread that runs throughout the stories,’ Giulia remembers, ‘but the experience of watching it doesn’t feel glitchy. It feels like a beginning to an end, but without a beginning and an end, so-to-speak.’
Films like this one, certainly, are reclaiming popular territory that was once held by movies like Tales From The Crypt (Francis, 1972), Creepshow (Romero, 1982), and Twilight Zone: The Movie (Landis, Spielberg, Dante & Miller, 1982).
Secondly, that going to the cinema has finally become a habit again. I say it’s because the world’s gone to hell. But Nic says something slightly more constructive: ‘When you get a lot of people in a cinema enjoying a film at the same time, it’s so great. It’s awesome. You just don’t get that at home. It’s totally different. I hope it really catches on because I would hate to see cinemas disappear. I want it to be a legacy thing. Something that will always be there. Like theatre.’
And that, in a nutshell, is why the Bermuda International Film Festival (not to mention, movies) is so important. Ready-made reachings-out. Ready-made stories. Ready-made dialogue. But it came from within you like the clearest of singing voices.