This week, the hairdressers in Belgium are allowed to reopen after months of corona closure, much lobbying, endless debates and great anticipation by some. Alas, cinemas remain shut. Therefore, Sabzian offers you some free film inspiration for your new, unkempt hairdo or for the professional readjustment of your lockdown mop.
A visit to the barbershop has been the source of many memorable film scenes. Think of Chantal Akerman’s musical, multicoloured hair salon in Golden Eighties, The Great Dictator’s shaving scene, set to Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5, Lino Ventura’s silent refuge with a barber in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, the surprising buzz cut in John Smith’s four-minute short OM, or the closely filmed trim with special tools in André Delvaux’s The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short. But rather than barber-set films, we’ve opted for some direct hairstyle advice for men and women. Because you’re worth it.
The Shanghai Gesture (Josef von Sternberg, 1941)
And what better stylist than Josef von Sternberg? In his wild film The Shanghai Gesture, Ona Munson shines as Mother Gin Sling, the Chinese owner of a decadent gambling palace. The extraordinary Munson, a natural blonde who’s best known as bordello madam Belle Watling from Gone with the Wind, delivers her career-best performance wearing a series of outlandish headdresses, the most lavish anyone had put on screen since von Sternberg’s films with Marlene Dietrich. With hair pieces coiffed high in lacquered snake-like sculptures, Munson’s sardonic matron has been described by Chuck Stephens as a “Medusa in antennae braids and hairpins of ancient jade”.
La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
From the extravaganza of von Sternberg to the asceticism of Carl Theodor Dreyer. The female buzz cut might find its filmic origin in Renée Falconetti’s Jeanne d’Arc and set the trend for other shaved-head woman warriors like Five Branded Women’s Jeanne Moreau, GI Jane’s Demi Moore, Alien 3’s Sigourney Weaver, V for Vendetta’s Natalie Portman, or Charlize Theron’s Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. Her face stripped of any make-up, Renée Falconetti had her hair cut off in close up with a pair of scissors. Locks whirl down and are swept into a dustpan. Tiny hairs stick to real tears. The film’s costume designer, Valentine Hugo, vividly remembered the shoot: “Particularly impressive was the day when, in the silence of an operating theatre, in the pale light of a morning execution, Dreyer had Falconetti’s hair cut close-cropped to the scalp. (…) The electricians and technicians held their breaths and their eyes filled with tears. Falconetti wept real tears. Then the director slowly approached her, gathered up some of her tears in his fingers, and carried them to his lips [in a gesture replicating Antonin Artaud’s monk, Jean Massieu, wiping away of Jeanne’s tears in the film].” Jean Renoir praised Falconetti’s performance and claimed: "That shaven head was and remains the abstraction of the whole epic of Joan of Arc."
Good Time (Benny Safdie & Josh Safdie, 2017)
For men, we could have gone for the erect hairdos of Eraserhead’s Jack Nance or Barton Fink, and the steely grey Tom Cruise from Michael Mann’s Collateral. However, midway through Benny and Josh Safdie’s Good Time, Robert Pattinson gives himself a cheap platinum-blonde dye job with what he can find in the bathroom of the 16-year-old girl he kisses and things just get worse for him. In a spin on the trope of criminals who change hair colour to go incognito, Pattinson’s character, Connie, looks like the male counterpart of the beach blonde Isabella Rossellini in Wild at Heart, or the reverse of Hitchcock’s Marnie—the thief who washes out her black hair dye and returns to blonde. Pattinson’s hair was dyed black for the first part of the film, then peroxided blonde, and actually bleached back and forth several times until they got all the scenes. His hair, in fact, eventually started falling out. The solemn moment when Pattinson puts on the colour in front of the mirror was filmed, but it was cut because it slowed down the pace of the film. Josh Safdie remarked: “But there was something great going on with it. This grown man trying to bleach his hair in an attempt to blend in.”
The Shanghai Gesture is available on Amazon Prime (in the US).
La passion de Jeanne d’Arc is available on LaCinetek, Amazon Prime, The Criterion Channel, Kanopy, MUBI UK, The BFI Player.
Good Time is available on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Google Play, YouTube, Apple TV, Kanopy, UniversCiné/Sooner.
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