It’s not uncommon to find a film within a film. Victor Erice twisted viewers into knots with the concept in Close Your Eyes and the Coens recreated Golden Age Hollywood magic in Hail, Caesar! Tarantino went wild with Rick Dalton’s filmography, while Spielberg explored his own first films. That’s not to mention Babylon, Mank, Bergman Island, No Bears, or Pain And Glory—and those are just some of the best examples from the last decade. This year, Rodrigo Sorogoyenutilized the tactic in The Beloved, which premiered at Cannes in May. But that wasn’t even the best display of a film within a film at the festival. That honor belonged to Jane Schoenbrun‘s Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma, a film that contains two distinct masterpieces—one on the surface and one entrenched inside.
Teenage Sex And Death runs heady circles around its layered metanarrative. Its story stretches from Schoenbrun’s life, to the life of their fictional counterpart Kris (Hannah Einbinder)—a queer, sexually repressed horror director on the rise who wants to make “something that feels fresh and new” out of the umpteenth reboot of a well-worn horror franchise—to the life of Kris’ cinematic subject Little Death (Jack Haven)—the trans, spear-wielding, vent-shaft-headed, Friday The 13th-esque lake-dweller at the center of the Camp Miasma franchise.
The depths of self-exploration are enough to drown in if you get too close to the edge, and it starts early, with the gobsmacking opening credits sequence establishing a fictional film universe so full of Camp Miasma myth and memorabilia that you’ll want to pause and rewind at least 50 times. Then, Schoenbrun makes clear through dialogue and ornamental lore that the original Camp Miasma was a groundbreaking film for the genre and the history of cinema.
It would’ve been easy for them to let us simply imagine that Camp Miasma reinvented the wheel in the same way Friday The 13th, Halloween,or some other heavily-franchised classic might’ve. Instead, Schoenbrun depicts Camp Miasma‘s most pioneering and experimental sequence in full (set to Counting Crows’ “A Long December”) for several minutes, drastically switching gears mid-movie into a maverick aesthetic that blends extreme fantastical violence, sad-boy indie sentimentalism, and a flurry of dreamlike angles and effects. The pressurized, busted-water-pipe blowout of blood from the bodies of Little Death’s victims is at once transfixing, disturbing, cartoonish, and comical; it’s as transporting as Teenage Sex And Death‘s matte background paintings, which bend reality and accentuate the theme of worlds within worlds.
The “Long December” killing spree sneaks the avant-garde into the film, but is it representative of the kind of reboot Schoenbrun wanted to make in real life? One that studios wouldn’t let them tackle with creative freedom? Or is it just a small glimpse of how many filmmaking tricks Schoenbrun has up their sleeve? Regardless of the answer, it’s an experimental, jaw-on-the-floor scene that makes you want to momentarily leave Teenage Sex And Death behind and hop into Camp Miasma.
Films within films have long allowed filmmakers to smuggle in versions of this kind of boundary-pushing fun, though it’s rare that the metamovies actually hold their own. Many films gesture at their embedded films—or blur them into the rest of the story, like Perfect Blue—but when it’s all said and done, only a few really pull it off like Camp Miasma. In one of the earliest examples, the groundbreaking The Cameraman, Buster Keaton only presents around 30 seconds of experimental cinematography to a gaggle of suits, who are so angered by the unsalability of his multiple-exposure passion project that they pound their fists and run him out of the room.
The Souvenir: Part II gets more time for its strange case, a semi-autobiographical story about a young woman struggling her way through film school in the aftermath of a tragic, turbulent relationship. For her film within a film, Joanna Hogg recreates sequences of Caprice, her graduation film, 33 years after she originally made it—albeit with a veteran indie budget, decades of experience under her belt, and Tilda Swinton’s daughter (Honor Swinton-Byrne, who acts as a stand-in for both her young mother and a young Hogg) instead of Swinton herself. But it’s not like people were watching Hogg’s debut short to begin with. That means there’s an unfettered freshness to the climactic reveal of Hogg’s inspired, early-career novelty.
As with the Camp Miasma sequence, Caprice is so unpredictable and unlike what we’ve seen in the larger film that it both shocks and stretches its audience. As if that isn’t enough, Hogg levels up her meta-take on films within films in the final moments by pulling the curtain back even more, leaving the audience with a shot that reveals the film set of The Souvenir: Part II, only to end with Hogg calling “Cut!” as the screen cuts chillingly to black.
But Irma Vep still reigns supreme in this particular niche, which makes it hard to imagine that Schoenbrun didn’t take some cues from it when fashioning their own film about a revolutionary director wrestling to reimagine a remake. Like Schoenbrun would later do in reference to the original Camp Miasma, Olivier Assayas writes dialogue where everyone on set of the film within the film speaks about the extraordinary filmography of director Rene Vidal (Jean-Pierre Léaud) as openly as they ridicule him behind his back, voicing their profound lack of faith in his late-career tendencies, so as to set up the remake’s deranged modern-art brilliance.
Assayas challenges himself to showcase several different styles in which he (or Vidal) could have remade their project: a black-and-white silent film to be true to the source; a sexy, steely blue Mission: Impossible-esque spy movie; a martial arts-inspired action bonanza; an intimate, grounded euro-art film. But we’ve seen all those styles before, and Assayas shows them to us with a sense of familiarity on purpose, as if to say, “Recognize this?” before he shows us something we won’t recognize at all. He ups the ante in the last sequence, ending the film with what he/Vidal came up with: an astounding dadaist film that no one, real audience or fictional crew, could’ve possibly imagined. Akin to the Camp Miasma sequence, it’s a tonally and stylistically shocking experience that opens doors to new expression. Vidal’s metafilm is steeped to the eyes in visual and sonic abrasion, like intrusive white noise sporadically cutting in and out and roughly drawn animation flashing and fluttering in chaotic spurts over live-action footage that’s been torn, scratched, melted, blurred, whipped around, and altogether brutalized in the edit. Just as audiences weren’t ready for what goes down in Camp Miasma‘s splatterfest, they weren’t ready for what was waiting inside Irma Vep.
It’s been 30 years since Irma Vep came out, and there were 68 years between Vep and The Cameraman, which makes the succession of The Souvenir: Part II and Teenage Sex And Death within five years of each other a boon for films within film. Modern auteurs like Panahi, Almodovar, Tarantino, Fincher, and Chazelle have dabbled, sure, but none have come close to using the mechanism to this effect. Schoenbrun’s bold vision reminds us what’s possible not only in a movie, but in the movies your movie imagines.
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