Weepies.
My favorite top three movie scenes of men crying, in order of ascending weirdness, plus a few notes on In My Skin.

Happy Together. Tony Leung with a tape-recorder, like a dictaphone. He’s supposed to speak a secret into it, something sad that his friend will release for him at Tierra del Fuego. (The same plot as in In the Mood for Love, where you can speak something into a certain place on the globe and leave it there.) He’s holding the tape recorder, trying to think of something to say, and just starts crying. Not tears-slowly-welling-up, but the face crumpled, abruptly, helplessly. Instead of putting his face in his hands he presses the tape recorder to his face.

Germany in Autumn Fassbinder plays himself, getting the news about Enslin's and Raspe's (members of Baader-Meinhof) deaths late at night; then he's drunk and abusive toward his boyfriend. I had always thought there was a lot of bullshit in that director-as-sadist thing; it seemed like a way for people to talk about personalities instead of talking about the actual films. But in this film, it works. Fassbinder is exceptionally nasty to the boyfriend/actor/boyfriend, and then he starts crying, himself. Drunk, in a dark living room, his bathrobe slipping off his fat body, he clutches a bottle of whiskey, and he sobs and sobs. It's operatic. It's beautiful.

Anatomy of Hell A suicidally depressed woman picks up a gay man (played by Italian porn actor Rocco Siffredi) at a men’s nightclub --she attracts him by using that tired old "I’ll slash my wrist again if you don’t let me blow you right now" gambit--and somehow they strike a deal: he will spend four consecutive nights with her. And each night is a longish lecture-demonstration on the passivity, endurance, persistence, and all-around horror of female flesh, especially female genitals. The fluids, the blood, the impassivity, the ability to absorb, to be penetrated, to engulf, to endure all manner of humiliation. There’s one night during which the woman does nothing but sleep while Siffredi explores her with the cruelty and curiosity of a kid pulling the wings off a fly--he does some shocking things, makes the most unglamorous experiments in penetration, just to see what’ll happen. Nothing happens; the sleeping, impassive body is unconquerable. And there’s a post-sex moment... see, I can’t write about this, even in my quasi-anonymous blog where I drop words like "blow" that I don't say so freely in real life. Anyway. There’s been lots of blood and fluid and he’s been fucking and then... nothing, there’s just nothing, no reaction. He cries. The character's defeat seems mechanically plotted; the whole film is algebraic in its step-by-step exploration of the all-abjection, all-horror all-the-time female sex and the rage and despair it causes in the man who confronts it. It’s this very programmed moment, and yet Siffredi carries it off by being so good at crying. Gouts of snot run from his nose, his beautiful torso is bowed and shaking.

(Later: I rented it. I have a lot of this mixed up: his defeat comes early on. The sobbing is just after he's barely done more than trade a few Kristeva-esque insults with her ("The depth of your obscenity... those who don't like women, envy you for it. Those who do, hate you for it.") The "shocking things" I allude to, even the blood pooling between them, that's all later, long after the weeping.)

***

I had started out intending to write something about Anatomy of Hell and In My Skin. But I didn’t get there. I will only say that In My Skin is good; it’s got a veneer of realism that Anatomy of Hell purposely lacks. The knowledge that the actor Marina de Van is the director makes certain thoughts difficult to avoid while watching the film. And also, as good as she is at deflecting a certain psychologization of cutting--it’s not presented causally, "I feel bad, so I cut; I feel ugly, so I cut"--as good as she is about getting past certain platitudes about female self-image, it’s hard to look at those Linda Hamilton biceps and the Brazilian wax job and not think about how she must have examined herself, how she must’ve gotten ready for the full-length shower scene. (On a French actress, that level of gym-body is odd.) --But maybe all this, my caviling and sniping at her looks, is a way of smuggling a logic of reflection into this film: I want to insist that she must have looked critically and appraisingly at herself. The film, in fact, is amazing in this: she experiences her body as an other, but almost never as a reflection. She has assignations with herself and her bloody flesh, but this is not a story of a double. And in directing herself, de Van is good at getting parts of her body to lie on subtly different planes. All torsion and twisting. She bends over herself, but I don’t mean in the sexualized phrase "bend over," I mean you’ll see her torso bending sideways, or a leg extending at an angle, and without being at all a contortionist about it, she gets her body to confront itself, she meets herself as if from elsewhere. The most shocking thing is not the blood or the obsession or the graphically simulated cutting, but the pleasure, at once erotic and non-genital, of a body bent toward or into itself.