What a delightful coincidence! Liam Le Guillou’s new documentary A Cursed Man opened yesterday at the Regal Union Square and the film begins with a quote from Milton (whom we just blogged about, for it’s his birthday): “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..” Something in the air! Monsters, perhaps? No, that’s Mary Shelley.
I very much enjoyed Le Guillou’s previous documentary An Unknown Compelling Force (2021), about the mysterious deaths of nine young hikers in the Ural Mountains in 1959. That one told a story I had never heard before, and, thanks to recent research, it answered several questions older than I am. A Cursed Man deals, too, with mysteries, and these ones are as old as humankind itself. These questions are not obscure ones though, but universal, and here the reckless fool courting doom is the film-maker himself.
A Cursed Man would make an interesting double feature with Andrew McCarthy’s Brats. The films share the common quirk of a film-maker deeply lacking in self-knowledge vulnerably placing himself front and center of his own movie, leading to much unintentional comedy, and vicarious embarrassment. The premise is that Le Guillou wants to see if magic is real. The specific form his experiment will take it is to approach practioners in various traditions (Wicca, Voodoo, Satanism, etc) in regions from Mexico to the Indian subcontinent, and ask them to place a curse on him so that he can see if the curse comes true. As a gimmick for a film, conceptually it comes perilously close to a Travel Channel documentary about haunted bed and breakfasts. Fortunately for Le Guillou, he’s actually a terrific producer. The subjects he encounters throughout the film are fascinating, wise, articulate, and intelligent people, and we learn tons from them. The bad news for Le Guillou? Is that the subjects he encounters throughout the film are fascinating, wise, articulate, and intelligent people, and we learn tons from them.
Right away, the various priests, wizards, holy people, and what have you, hit up Le Guillou with the very questions that ought to be filling your own head the instant he announces his intentions. For example: Why a curse? Why not some positive manifestation of supernatural power? Le Guillou’s answer, that it will be the more obvious measure of magic’s efficacy reveals both a disrespect for the traditions and the practioners (i.e., to be so rash as to ask for a curse is to declare yourself a skeptic, a non-believer, or someone who takes serious practices very, very lightly) and an unconscious racism (i.e. a lack of awareness about your own good fortune and entitlement). As a Voodoo priest in New Orleans points out, all of the black people he knows, including himself, feel cursed every day of the week. In their case, a BLESSING (say, winning the Lotto or something) would be the change you would notice. If your life is so good that you wouldn’t notice anything but a curse, hell, you DESERVE one! Which is no doubt why another, less principled NOLA Conjure Man in the film does give Le Guillou what he asks for, cackling all the while at his idiocy.
In addition to the esoteric practioners in the film, Le Guillou also interviews scientists and psychologists who explore the phenomena in question, and they are no less worried about the outcome of this project, for reasons related to that Milton quote…which is similar too to Shakespeare’s in Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”. To a large extent, even wondering if your luck is bad leads to bad luck. But either way (and this never gets stated in the film that I can recall), to shift to the wisdom of the economist, “correlation does not imply causation”. In other words, if something bad happens to the guy, how do you prove that it’s due to the curse? Unless the curse is absurdly specific (i.e. “You will step on a garden rake like Elmer Fudd and the rake’s handle will smack you in the face) and then, against incredible odds that actually happens, you can always chalk it up to coincidence.
Still, this guy know his story needs an arc, so after he gets cursed, he’s gotta court some danger. Lo and behold, wouldn’t you know that he goes mountain biking (with at least two cameras on the scene) and then wipes out, messing up his knee for a few months? This seemed so contrived I was roaring with laughter throughout. The curse’s other manifestation? He had a bad dream that something happened to his cat! For real! Basically I was laughing every time Le Guillou was on camera, for he reminds me of a cross between Alan Ruck as Conor Roy and any character from a Christopher Guest film. There were times when I didnt believe he was for real, and was waiting for the movie to reveal itself as either an improv fueled Guest style comedy, or perhaps a “found footage” horror movie.
But no. The upshot is that Le Guillou gets really wigged out by the bad mojo and gets his friends to conduct a curse removal ritual. I wonder if it took. And if this movie does poorly and gets bad reviews, is that just part of the curse?
For more on A Cursed Man, go here.