Bat City Marquee: WITH PLEASURE

Bat City Marquee is a column where the Hyperreal Film Club editors check in on the wide world of new Austin-made videos and films. To submit a video for consideration, drop us a line at hq@hyperrealfilm.club 📼

Have you noticed that the way you watch movies changes over time? This past Sunday, I went to see Mulholland Drive at the Paramount (god bless the Summer Classic Film series, by the way) and was reminded of the first time I saw it on a scavenged CRT TV back in college a decade ago. Upon that first viewing, I scoured the nascent internet for explainers, clues, really anyone with the hubris to take a shot at telling me what in the living silencio I’d just witnessed. I came away with some garbled information, which, honestly, was probably somewhat satisfying at the time.

Upon this viewing (and stick with me, it all connects), I crumpled my thinking cap up into a tiny ball and tossed it in the bucket with the popcorn kernels. Is a vivid dream less powerful for the untraceable narrative? Do you speak to angels with your human tongue? Do you need to understand the intricate and intractable laws of gravity to fear a fall from a great height? Sometimes the there there is more ineffable than narrative, and such is the case with the gorgeous, mysterious, blazingly inventive With Pleasure.

As you may have guessed from the opening, this review will lean somewhat overly heavy on referents, so if that ain’t your bag, stick around for the pictures and then you can be on your way with my blessing. Still here? We open with a shot De Palma would envy: a cold open on an intricately made up singer and a slow roll back revealing her stage and the room until two silhouetted figures lean in from either side of the frame for a kiss. Across the moment, the singer’s voice shifts from whispery studio vocals to a diegetic sound that reveals the chatter of the room.

“As the late, great Pablo Neruda once said… loving is so short, forgetting is so long.” One of my very favorite things is a movie character who can summon up the perfect line of poetry, the perfect fragment of scripture or philosophy, to pin a moment to a cloud. I’ve talked about this with lots of smart folks and everyone assures me that no one IRL can do this; I have my doubts, but still. Shouldn’t every beating heart in a movie be 10 times smarter than a real person? What’s the point, otherwise? We march forward through a reactively quoted quote from Pedro Calderon De La Barca and a third figure quoting Christopher Marlowe; eventually we join two figures at the bar, one of whom quotes an old proverb he dredges from the murk of his mind: “If your messenger is slow, then go meet him.” *shivers in cinephile*

The film revels in its Panos Cosmatos meets Věra Chytilová aesthetic and churns its Buñuel sensitivities through a sort of frenetic Baz-Luhrmann’s-evil-twin machine, all while occasionally glancing at a signed first edition of Dalí’s surrealist cookbook lying open on a coffee table made of people. The makeup, costumes, and set design are just… wow. Impeccable. Transporting. The glowing gelatins and grapes, the lemon slices laid out just so in an end-of-empire sort of way, and a light Ari Aster wavy drug wash heighten the sense of otherworldly strangeness.

People throw the word “Lynchian” around as much as they do “Kafkaesque.” I mean listen, I’ve got zero problem with that — shit is fucking hard to describe sometimes! However, I want to use it here in a specific sense. With Pleasure delivers that Lynchian drive found in Mulholland Drive and pieces of Twin Peaks: The Return, a compulsive and dreamlike noir tug, a coring out of any narrative snags that might slow your momentum on your slide into madness, a totality of phantasmagoria that blocks out any probing logic tendrils that would doubtless try to sneak into your mind if you weren’t being led by the nose through a gorgeous maze.

With at least one festival appearance in the books at this point, let’s all hope that With Pleasure is gearing up for a hell of a fest run. This team deserves their flowers! Expect this name to pop up on plenty of fave lists and roundups of Most Visually Gobsmacking. Honestly, I think a fest audience’s one complaint might be that they can’t pause, rewind, and watch again as each frame is packed full of about 103 wondrous things to look at. Best wishes to this wildly creative team of filmmakers, and hope all y’all can track down a screening somewhere!