On Nicolas Roeg’s “Eureka”
Nicolas Roeg, who died last week aged ninety, was a master of imagery. An editor turned cinematographer, Roeg’s penchant for the perfect shot remained intact even as he turned to direction. He made films with a basic idea of conveying themes and motifs through the raw appeal of images. Everything else — story, dialogue, characters, acting — was to be accommodated grudgingly. Or at times shunted aside altogether in favor of a gorgeously eerie piece of, say, a man blowing his brains off. His was a bravura style that bordered on the ridiculous. Critics roundly panned his films, but the obsessively imagistic cinema he practiced was his own thing. Burying into Roeg’s oeuvre makes filmmaking look deceptively simple. Gone are the rules of chronology or logic, his films can explode into the sensational on a whim, or take off from the solid ground of narrative to wade into the supernatural without a hint. Roeg believed in the power of films but not in the traditional way they were made. When it worked, his visually leaden style spoke more clearly, more enduringly than the finest dialogues. Which is why that early aerial shot in his 1983 film Eureka — a film that begs to share a shelf alongside his more recognized works like Don’t Look Now and Bad Timing — sends such a creepy chill that stays nagging even when the film moves to a sultry island near Miami. Nicolas Roeg, like all great filmmakers, was also a master of mood.
Eureka throbs with a zany energy that boils over into the macabre. On the outset, it is an unspecial tale of the perils of greed: man finds gold, buys an island, marries, sees his daughter fall for a lout who he suspects is after his fortune, fends off the mafia who want to build a casino on the said island, dies after coming close to committing murder. Coursing through the plotline, in person and as spirit, is Freida (Helena Kallianiotes), a seer who lives in a brothel and dies waiting for the man when he is away on his quest for gold. In the film’s best line, Freida says, “Once we had a crock of gold — your cock and my crack, a crock of gold.” That man, named Jack McCann (Gene Hackman), sits across from her, clad in a bathrobe, bored stiff, caressing a crystal. “Gold smells stronger than a woman,” he says. Freida has lost her man for gold. The rest of the film is about a man who is so desperately lost into himself that, when time comes, he can’t help losing to others.
The glitter of gold has turned many a man’s soul sick. Traditionally, goldhunting in films has been a group activity, as Dobbs and Colorado would attest. McCann, on the other hand, shuns company and goes after it all by himself. And he finds it not in bagfuls, or diluted in dust, but in a forceful flood that explodes like a volcano, leaving him awash and aglitter and rich beyond measure. It is, by any stretch of imagination, a spectacular event, and Roeg makes it believably emphatic, covering the screen with gold crystals shimmering and dancing to the resounding background score of Stanley Myers. “I’m frightened someone’s trying to break into my life,” says McCann, now older but no less rich. “I have no partners,” he declares at one point, a golden gun in hand, acting brave to the threats of the mafia but betraying an inherent nature of his to operate alone and unaided. This misanthropy of McCann manifests itself into the central theme of Eureka. The island hence becomes a metaphor for the boundaries we draw and the many ways they can be breached in the interests of the self and of others.
Eureka is full of mindblowing images that seem standalone at first but are connected to each other in their own convoluted way. Take that man who shoots himself through his head, a scene that wouldn’t look out of place in a Tarantino flick; we realise it is a fellow-goldhunter coming to a dire end, thus presaging McCann’s own brutal end. Or that overhead shot in which Freida writhes on the couch, tries to entice McCann, and creates a sexually charged atmosphere whose pathos lies in that it fails to spark a response and ends in tears instead, heralding more to come. Toward the end, when a boat rows away in a background becalmed with sad colors of the sunset, one can’t help but think: Where would Roeg be without color? Roeg’s films often make one lose track of the tale, but they never make one look away.
A courtroom procedure follows McCann’s death, and it is here that we see Roeg falter. The film, otherwise so pulsating with mystery and mystic, feels grindingly mechanical. The camera glides, hovers, and zooms in on crying women, but the indoors seem to have bound Roeg, leaving him with little room to break away and amp up the tension. One is reminded of the expansive, elaborate images that opened the film, which is where Roeg was at his expressive, experimental best.
Asked to name the ten best films from the Criterion collection, Roeg placed L’avventura at the top of his list. One can see why the intensely atmospheric Antonioni so mesmerised Roeg in the aesthetics of Eureka and in its shocking exposures of human weaknesses. One sees it in the heavy trust placed on images alone to do the bulk of propelling a film into motion, and often to confound the audience into gobsmacked admiration. Roeg’s genius lay in his brazen bending of the mainstream to venture into the surreal, to bully time into running slow and stretching space to achieve that enchanting effect, to scorch the viewers’ eyes and make the essentially flat screen of cinema swell and writhe with untold, unknowable agony. Eureka remains a shining testament to that genius.
Nicolas Roeg is gone, his images are here to stay.
