The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

I recently watched both The Man Who Fell to Earth, a cult movie by the eccentric director Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, Don't Look Now) and Jonathan Glazer's hyped - and weird - Under the Skin. Without being derivative, the latter film unashamedly draws on Roeg's (infamous?) classic. Roeg is a master of composition: his images often have a painterly quality and there is often something very unnerving about them, even though you may not always be able to put your finger on what is so unsettling.

If you hear a summary of what happens in the film, you might be put off. An alien - David Bowie is the obvious choice! - comes to earth to get water for his desert-like planet and gets kind of stuck in the human form of life, the corporate world - and a relationship with a human. Hmmm, indeed. For all its silliness, and there is truly plenty of it, The Man Who Fell to Earth excesses in cinematically glorious eerie moments; Bowie's icily detached face is the perfect center of the film's strangeness. Bowie IS an alien. Roeg looks at the world, as he often does, from the point of view of alienation. Bowie's alien wanders around, makes business deals, hooks up - but nothing seem to matter much. After a while on planet earth, he slides into depression, drinking GT's and watching TV. The earth, of course, is represented as a spiritual desert. Roeg throws in a few references to ecological desaster and corporate corruption - the earth does not seem a particularly friendly place. The point, basically, seems to be that nobody is truly at home. Perhaps Roeg would not have neeeded extraterrestial excursions to bring home that message, but then again, this film's idiosyncratic use of 'aliens' sets up a peculiar mood. Pretty much everything of what's going on is shrouded in big mystery. This feeling of mystery is enhanced by Roeg's approach to images. These are not 'perspicuous representations', you know, the kind of broad presentations that traditionally takes you by the hand in a movie to make you familiar with the setting of the film. Here, instead, time and space are broken, ruptured by the use of fragments and cross-cutting. There are conspiracies and plotting - but the essential theme is the alien's alienated state, which illustrated through imagery left elusive enough to haunt one's imagination for a long time.