Reviews

This was my 2nd excursion into the world of Svankmajer; after being thoroughly swept away by Faust, this was the next stop. The lack of human presence is comforting in itself, the actions do seem to take place in a land of fantasy, because retreating from reality is paramount… But the intermittent and frequent appearance of Alice's mouth reminds us that this is just a narrative, fantasy is a story, take it or leave it. Fantasy cannot be taken too seriously. We try to mesh dreams with the real world, but we stumble upon our own ambivalence, and I feel this was represented by her shifting between the small doll and the big real girl. There are certain doors you cannot access when assuming a certain form. The message seems to be one of an amorphous, atemporal world… there is a degree of overlap between physical entities, death is mocked, physical integrity is mocked as well; we fall apart, our entrails seep out, yet we are revitalized by our own bodily debris. This seems to be comparable to Alice's feeding on her internal world to nourish all aspects of her experience. Heads are cut off on a whim; yet, as the scene where the different animals' and Alice's heads are shown in an alternating manner on the same body, we are faced with the idea that, when boundaries are lost, we realize that every representation of self and others that we engender is colored by our own lens. Our defensive structure is what sets the stage… Alice is both martyr and executioner. As she finds more and more keys, deeper niches in her mind are unlocked, and the pieces become ever more integrated. It would appear that, when returning to the real world, the overtly random aggression shown in her mind has been transposed into her waking life, and she voices that she will cut off the rabbit's head for being late, thus turning into her persecutor as a form of domesticating her murderous lust. Yet, it is still her mouth voicing over this thought… reality mustn't be taken too seriously either, for it is also a narrative, our narrative, and we have painted the world as we have along our own storytelling lines. In this sense, dream and reality are the same… The childish concept of deathlessness is a fragile saving grace that speaks beyond the conscious experience of adults, and perhaps it's a world we can only hope to return to once innocence is newly instilled by death.

Despite the year this film was made, I believe the issues it addresses remain exceedingly current. I think it is somewhat of a synecdoche of what society at large instills in people nowadays. It is very difficult to tread outside of the very well-delineated lines our superego has drawn for us. Antoine seems to be spiraled into this vertiginous voyage of soul destruction on almost a whim. I think it is symptomatic of our culture to "lend" our views of the world to the children, stating how they should feel and act, while not allowing their free expression of emotion. It is tragic, yet it reveals the parents' own unresolved issues and their need to project their own unwanted aspects into their kids, in whom they can exercise a more strict control. So, in the end, children not only have to carry the burden of their own emotionally chaotic and ever-changing inner world, but they need to shoulder the brunt of their parents' failings as well; perhaps this was best exemplified when Antoine's parents demand that he take the garbage out, they need to remind him that in the final analysis he is responsible for dealing with everybody's waste. What ensues in someone who has been so brow-beaten by life, without ever having their own emotions validated, is that they doubt the reality of their emotions, and encapsulate themselves into a protected world that is numb to any further assault by the world, what Sidney Klein would term an "autistic cyst." The destruction of all that is externally good is symbolized when he is being taken away in the police wagon, the tears he sheds represent the death of emotion in itself, in a cathartic manner. When the end rolls around, even fantasy cannot save him. He approaches the ocean and when he sets foot in the water, her starts to walk sideways and eventually turns away with an emotionless face… the world has nothing left to offer him. His mother also plays out her own intrapsychic dynamic very well; she suffers between the pull of her id and her superego; her id is represented by Antoine, since he was conceived out of wedlock, and he is the personification of her rebellious side. Society (including her husband) puts demands on how her child should be reared, and since he represents such a powerful force in herself, a selfobject coruscating with a lust she perhaps wishes she could reclaim, there must be hell going on inside her head. She eventually succumbs to the oppressive punitive superego, and the only way she can eliminate her pulsating id is to eliminate her contact with its concrete representation, her son. She isolates her affect and summarily casts him into the destructive world that in essence destroyed her as well.

This film transposes the concept of ignored transparency beautifully. It is something we all engage in, rather egregiously, yet it is difficult to see if portrayed so vividly. There is indeed destruction behind beauty, and despite conscious efforts and wishes to see something modified into a supposedly "better" condition, it becomes clear that the unconscious desire will ultimately wreak havoc, especially when aided by a dysfunctional and envious mass mentality. Unintegration prevailed, and when a unifying force showed up in Dogville, one that could make the town actually unite in something positive (the admiration and appreciation of Grace's presence), the threat of disintegration ensued, and she needed to be destroyed and incorporated into the unintegrated structure. There truly are no walls to hold us in, we are all very knowing and aware of what goes on in the minds and bodies of our fellow man, and truly the structures we edify are illusory and used as defense mechanisms so as to not have to identify with the perverse nature of others we see in ourselves. This movie begets the question alluded to at the end, which I interpreted as "is this town real?" (reinforced by the drawing of the dog becoming real at that moment), and truly it is, real in every individual psychic microcosm as an intolerable reality; one may even sympathize with the murderous mobsters at the end wiping out the hapless people. There really is no escape from this labyrinth of twisted logic, we really are primitive beings.

In this film, the overarching story is one of futile sexuality, a sexuality that is used in a counter-intuitively destructive manner. Consummation is procured not with the intention of creating life, but of harming another person. And, as much as animalistic allusions are referred to and this seemingly incessant drive to reach a state of primitive ecstasy is echoed time and again, whenever sexual acts are described, they are done so in a dehumanized, emotionless manner, as if to say that they can only exist as an abstraction. This is reinforced by the fact that the acts are never actually shown, only talked about. Julia Roberts portrays perhaps the most tragic character of all, as she becomes the "sad stranger" in an ever-changing partner merry-go-round, yet, as Larry put it, she does not want to be happy, and has to compromise in order to avoid being swallowed by uncertainty. As she kisses Dan at the beginning of the film, her camera goes off, and she immediately stops… she makes sad strangers look beautiful in photographs, and when her picture is taken, she runs the risk of looking beautiful, a threat which proves too big. Equally living in a psychogenic vortex is Dan himself, who pines for his mother every night and tries to sublimate this by engaging in intercourse with unknown women, he cannot risk becoming dependent on someone who may ultimately leave him (as parents almost inexorably do). He desires Anna "because she doesn't need" him. When he's on the computer talking to Larry, he personifies his conflict well. He cannot have the desired object, thus he must become the object, and control her fate… he pretends to have an orgasm as Anna, yet says it was not good, closing in the fantasy that he is the only man who can provide Anna with a pleasurable sexual experience, he controls her orgasmic thrill, as it was. The movie's title tantalizingly denotes how at so many different points in the film one character is longing for a holding, comforting "other", yet this other is never in the same place. Scene after scene we observe one person crying and begging for some sign of mirroring affection, but crying is reproached by the detached party, in a sick fourth-dimensional mockery of human relations, yet one that is very accurate in showing that when one succumbs to the desire of the other (showing vulnerability, devotion, commitment), desire is killed. They are all spheres in themselves who are too afraid to touch because they may fuse, so an intellectualized verbal experience of intimacy is all they can hope for.

My introduction to this movie occurred at a particularly poignant moment in my own life, so I believe it resonated deeper than I could have foreseen. It is a message that bridges the gap between despair and hope. The main character Watanabe, upon finding out he will be dying of stomach cancer (in a vague, clearly paternalistic way as far as the medical system is concerned), puts his life into perspective and struggles with how to proceed during his final days. This struggle is seen very viscerally during the night club scene, when everyone around him is dancing with reckless abandon, "living their lives", as it was, yet they do so without direct recognition of their own mortality. When the idea of death comes piercing through the night in the guise of the melancholic tune Watanabe sings, dancing stops and what is translated is how difficult it really is to enjoy life when its end becomes transparent.

He is led through the maze of self-transformation, through the auspices of "a good Mephistopheles who seeks no reward," and the ever-empowering feminine presence, the Anima (in Jungian terms). He desperately seeks to adopt the persona of those who are not sentenced to a more imminent demise, turn them into an eternity-conferring selfobject. But, alas, it is not to be, but rather than admit defeat and wither into the grave as a defeated wretch to the whims of time, he builds upon the energy instilled in him, and in a poignant moment new consciousness is born as a group of adolescents sing "happy birthday" just as he is descending the staircase. The transcendence of his passing manifests through the retelling of his final days during his wake, he has managed to cheat death in remaining in the hearts and memories of the ones he left behind. His ultimate demise represents his knowledge of inevitable annihilation and rebirth, the never-ending cycle that besieges all living creatures; he, in essence, "fuses" with nature and allows himself to be reintegrated into it. The meaning of life is truly that it goes on, and you can in effect conquer death by understanding what lies behind life. And that is something Kurosawa did beautifully in this film.

It's very clear that Lars von Trier has a penchant for digging his nails into the festering wounds of the human psyche, which is almost invariably grist for the psychopathological mill. An asset of this film is that, in disarming the legend of Medea of its fantastic/mythical qualities, and thus "reducing" it to a story about a rejected woman who seeks revenge for the slight committed against her, it resonate a lot more with everyday experience, allowing it to shape itself according to our notion of reality. This can be terrifying, especially with the subject matter at hand. Some authors have argues that there is an infanticidal urge in all mothers, whether conscious or not (usually the latter). Those who act on it are usually portrayed as demonic and/or insane. This is a massive denial of the murderous tendencies present in all living creatures, a denial which seems necessary since it allows people to have some semblance of control over their minds and actions. But, given the right circumstances, the illusion is shattered, and a new balance needs to be reached. In the case of Medea, her narcissistic wound is too great to bear, yet the perpetrator cannot be attacked directly (for whatever reason). Her sexuality is rejected, thus she proceeds to destroy any evidence of his. She murders his bride-to-be as well as some of her family members. The epitome of her acts is the killing of her 2 children, which happens in a very matter-of-fact manner. The "intruder complex" can be felt in the mind of the eldest son, who gladly assists in killing the younger brother, pulling him down as he hangs helplessly from the tree. He thus fulfills his own unconscious wish of destroying his uterine rival. Her "psychogenic sterility" is accomplished, and she can depart. Again, the more realistic tones to the film are a huge asset.. she sits on a ship, waiting for the tide to carry them away... had the golden chariot of Helios, pulled by winged dragons, flown her away holding her dead sons with her, perhaps the impact wouldn't have stuck... score one for the director.

I've really come to expect more from the Coen bros. I've almost invariably enjoyed their previous films, finding them very witty, sharp, and pervaded with dark humor. This film relies heavily on a pronounced dichotomy between fast-paced banter and typical "Hollywood" resolutions; there seems to be a nice story build-up to a place of despair, in which they realize the trail has gone cold and the spectator can feel the emptiness in any further pursuits. After this the movie spirals into a formulaic approach to story-telling; there seems to be a time constraint in which they need to crank out the remaining details listed in the script. The bad guy is miraculously found, the little girl avenges her father after being saved at the last second (more than once) by the deus ex machina of screenwriters (blatantly spitting in the face of real life, which has no such piety.. human life is ballast at most, but essentially useless)... I find it hard to believe that anyone who has some degree of familiarity with cinema still finds relief in having the hero come through virtually unscathed (her losing her arm doesn't change the direction of this diatribe). It's sad... I had high hopes for the performance of Jeff Bridges, but he wasn't able to provide enough contrast to the role to be convincing. We'll see what the directors come up with next, but this one did not deliver.

The pervasive theme in this film is the struggle one has with their own shadow... It becomes clear that Nina is trying to embody the puritanical mode of being, yet disavowing her dark side.. but the latter provides an overwhelming resistance as time passes, showing itself in sublimated manners, as it tries to free itself. Clawing away at her skin consistently is an indication of this destructive force trying desperately to find liberation. Now, the dance she engages in with this figure takes on interesting contours. The child being seen as the symptom of its parents casts a stronger light on the mother figure, who cries as she paints, who castrated herself in order to obey some greater calling in life, who smacks the daughter who tries to defuse herself from the imposing phallic mother (phallic yet castrated, creating a weird amalgam). If fusion is the tendency, is the norm, can one imposing object be replaced with another? Nina grapples with the notion of fusion or destruction of her double, a self-confident sexualized version of herself; the scene where Nina engages in sexual acts with "Lily" represents the sought-for incestuous bond with her own split off part… it could be looked at as her reintegrating herself with her mother, but in a much more psychically-accepting manner, since true incest would be intolerable. The hallucinatory and delusional undertones color the film in a manner which may preclude any definitive interpretations. In a mind-boggling final act, the white swan is enticed by her own darkness, murders the split-off double, allowing fusion of her pure and her destructive/sexual parts… when this occurs, it is clear which part predominates, the black swan astounding the spectators with her seductive guise. Reality becomes unbearable, it is made clear Nina, in trying to destroy her primitive projection, was in truth attacking self in fantasy and reality, and she ran back to her psychic haven, which she was familiar with… thus the white swan reemerges… the autistic self does not regard the outside world, she is pervaded by persecutory internal objects, and she must devise an illusory beautiful self and commit the ultimate sacrifice in order to die the "perfect" death… fantasy is consummated, she rids herself in all ways of the lethal forces inside her, but to do so is to die once again as a fused being, in denial of her shadow.

I think that the main difference between this film and its predecessor is the message you're left with. The 1st film allows you to believe that there is hope in spite of all the chaos surrounding us, beauty behind destruction, as it was. The 2nd one unceremoniously rips that away with a disconcerting violence. It leaves us bereft… At least that's how I felt throughout a great part of it, especially towards the middle to end. The chaos is left to act of its own accord, and it's a downward spiral toward a cage from which there is no possible escape. Conform to the rules of the system or be killed rebelling against it. Our knowledge of others is usually one of rehearsed insipidness and persiflage. Immersion into the surface turns out to be much more revealing than could ever have been predicted. Truly, the poor are the mass, they hold the collective political power, and yet do not (cannot) hold this power with an iron fist because they are too weak and ignorant to understand it, a position forced upon them by the unremitting circumstances society holds them in (I remember visiting portions of a slum in which the people there never had their births registered, they essentially did not exist, apart from having no idea at all about caring for basic needs, like brushing their teeth). Thus, their deplorable condition of living in misery and desperately wanting to be hauled out of the darkness is exploited by the police and politicians. In this ever-expanding social pyramid, in which the rich are fattening themselves up at the top, the poor at its base begin to sink further into the mud until there is no breathing room. The director and screenwriters offer up a devastating view of social reality, leaving the adage that "you can't trust anyone" as the only unquestionable truth. The absolute irony behind this sequel is that Capt. Nascimento, toted as a nefarious fascist villain in the 1st movie, turns into the antithesis of evil here… suddenly his past history of leading death squads and torture festivals is swept under the rug and he is redeemed, reborn. He is the only one the audience can cling to in the midst of the despair being portrayed. He is symbolically "relied upon" to keep us safe in this world in which the laws we've become dependent on to live our lives in a safe way have started to disintegrate right before our eyes, leaving us groundless and vulnerable. How to respond to a feeling of vulnerability? Primary process world, aka aggression and sex… The 2nd isn't much of an option, since we're channeling this by proxy. What's left to do is murder the destabilizing forces and reestablish a sense of order (as tenuous and illusory as it may be). The sequence in the final third of the film makes one thing clear: the reality became too much for the makers of this film to handle, they needed to eventually shy away from the sewage they were focusing on… it can become overwhelming to not shine a nightlight of hope into the void, and that is what is done when Nascimento takes on this superhero role and vanquishes evil… even though his efforts are then swallowed up by the amorphous blob of chaos so the latter could continue with its carnage, this little storyline shows the director felt we all needed a reprieve, him and us. It would've been much more raw and realistic for there to have been a different outcome for Nascimento, but I can only imagine the gaping wound this would have left in its viewers, for at that point I was already filled with despair, but was "granted" the chance to remount my defenses to a more comfortable degree. I loved this film, it's right up there with the first, and I have to say that the main character is on the fast track to becoming a Brazilian cultural icon (more so than he already was), the ruthlessly destructive force that people have been left with no choice but to mirror themselves on.

I almost thought at the beginning that it would be an accurate portrayal of a psychiatric ward; I liked the fact that it isn't a disparaging comment on the uselessness of the profession (it actually does help a lot of people), and the unit psychiatrist is shown as an empathic creature. The business-like approach Craig gets when he says he's suicidal seems pretty spot-on, at least until patients are triaged through. Now, the unrealistic components may find some degree of justification in trying to make the movie's premise take off, such as finding the door to the stairwell unlocked (???), having a visitor alone in the patient's room (????), the absolute lack of division between patient age and psychopathology on the unit (let the language of absence speak loudly.. they're just renovating their adolescent unit, which apparently would only have 2 patients on it), and the fact that having a relationship with a borderline self-mutilator is a hellish ride (not all that cuts is borderline, point taken, but she fits the mold, even if her character is insanely underdeveloped). If one turns an amaurotic eye to these items, the film still falls flat; it can call itself an independent film until there are no more dead horses left to beat, but honestly I saw no raw emotion or frailty in the film, nothing rang true with regards to any real human experience… life is tragic, adolescent angst multiplies this reality 1000-fold. There is no proverbial bow waiting to be bestowed onto anybody's life, but they would have us believe in the magic of the 5-day curative stay… The bubble-gummy teenage happy message is "you have such a wonderful suburban hipster life ahead of you… it's hip to be depressed man, we've all been there". Way to market Zoloft as "the drug" to make one feel better (that phallic comment probably wouldn't have been there if he was still on it), product placement much? Anyway, silly film, reasonably OK premise but not at all convincing of anything except that I should've learned my lesson after watching the trainwreck that was Juno that "independent" is another word for "Hollywood suck-up script with less money".

Really won't have too much to say about this one… it was voted best film of the year (2009) by Film Quarterly, something that stood out in a year that had quite a few films I enjoyed. I did have the impression that for most people, it probably was very slow-paced, although this was not a detriment to me, as more and more it hits me when I watch movies that they can parallel the cadence of reality without being dull.

The idea behind the film is that we are trapped in a web of words, the cages that have been structured around us may seem somewhat lax when you look at specific portions of it, but the overall apparatus definitely is much more constraining than it seems, especially when one wants to take moral or spiritual liberties. The world has become bureaucratic and concrete, everything can be reduced to a verbal description (some would go as far as to say the unconscious is one big web of linguistic elements). This definitely transforms anything ethereal into an insipid, lifeless description. The main character (Christi, whose religious and sacrificial connotations never came to fruition) struggles to release himself from the death grip of conformity… he is rendered a slave to linguistics, something he has to question in a displaced manner when ranting to his wife about how the song she listens to makes no sense.

Anyway, he fights the powers to be with his sense of "moral law", but after being beaten over the head with his own idiosyncratic definitions of morality, he is given the choice between the chaos of a structure-less and self-defining moral code and the concrete, oppressive, mind-shrinking world of the laws of the physical world, which carry the burdensome weight of their own absurdity, gift-wrapped with the guise of wisdom. He decision is the same one most people would make, it's very difficult to imagine any other outcome

Well, this film was highly anticipated by me (it had won the un Certain Regard prize at Cannes). The message is one of enclosed despair, it mirrors what it's like to be perpetually condemned to a preverbal state, and not having the tools to deal with it. It seems that, once play can no longer sustain oneself, one must retreat to a world of sexuality and aggression. Since the eldest daughter incorporated the nameless and hopeless lifestyle imposed by her parents, she was indeed an incarnation of their nefarious deeds. The only way to break free from their rules would be to attack their rules, and this could only be accomplished by attacking herself. The scene where she knocks her tooth out with a hammer is intense and realistic, yet behind pain and destruction there is beauty, in the disfigured and bloody smile leering back from the mirror. Life could no longer go on the way it had, the incestuous nature of the family unit had reached an extreme. In a bizarre bathtub scene, the brother sits there and gropes the naked bodies of his sisters, one at a time, feeling their breasts and then their buttocks, I imagine in an attempt to see which causes him to be more aroused. As everything else that conveys true emotion in this family, the scene transpires in uncomfortable silence, the demon of preverbal communication again casting its shadow. Born preverbal, dead preverbal, as the labyrinth of abandoned speech is manifest in the eldest daughter's aborted escape, remaining locked in the car trunk, representing in a very vivid manner that, upon mustering the desire to leave the perverted Eden in whence she dwelled, she was in effect entering her coffin.

I need to write this review in the wake of having seen the film. The primordial notion behind it is rebirth, but rebirth not only in the actual reincarnated physical sense, as is ultimately consummated, but also rebirth in the sense of being reintegrated with the breast; the notion of incest is absolutely pulsating throughout the entire film, and the metamorphosis of characters experienced throughout the sexual encounters is brutally direct in this sense. It would seem that the dream-like state one is immersed in after death is what allows the maximal realization of this basic instinctive drive, since it would be a state in which all repression is lifted, and desire can be experienced in its purest, most raw form without the nay-saying psychic censor beeping like crazy. This is clearly too threatening for a conscious "normal" person to face up to in their everyday experience, thus dreams and reality are distorted to conform to our particular compromise formations, allowing us to live day-to-day without being overburdened by the anxiety of facing our sexual urges head-on.

In its analytic scope, the Oedipal ties are clearly laid out as unresolved; the little boy experiences the death of his parents with detachment, the death of the rival (his father) and of his love object (his mother) occurring simultaneously, a kind of reverse deus ex machina operating in a perverse way, the rival is killed but in a way that destroys the princess they were fighting over. The impotence he experiences (double meaning) carries its weight retroactively in the notion that his mother tells him that she loves Oscar and his father, but in "very different ways", the Lacanian notion of "the name of the father" rearing its ugly head, the mother loves something the son can never provide to her (the phallus), thus the sexualized love cannot be realized. But in a moment of utmost mirroring of the father figure, Oscar enters the body of the father and sees himself through his eyes, watching his mother contort during sex and seeing "little Oscar" at the door, watching his parents.

As the mother figure died, Oscar must appeal to the next best thing in line, the mother's daughter… And the pact to remain faithful to his sister creates a sublimated metaspace that permits the diluted enactment of his desire to be engulfed and reattached to the primordial breast, at least as a promise. Linda apparently shares in some kind of dynamic of her own, as she kisses her brother in a sensuous way, she herself living her own Elektra symbolism through Oscar. Anyway, as Oscar enters the head of Alex, the rule-free realm of the symbolic permits him to experience his fantasy of incest with his sister, turned mother (in a flash), turned sister… The morbid desire for fulfillment compels him to enter for a brief period into the aborted fetus his sister produced, even the split and murdered off component of his sister representing a possibly desired destiny. Truly the "come inside me" line almost in itself justifies choosing English as the primary language for this film, and the encapsulated space of his sister's uterus creates the holding environment for the engulfment to occur… attached at last; the most poignant moment is when the baby is still attached to his sister (or is it his mother?) by the umbilical cord and is brought to the nipple, which is the only element seen clearly (this was a very smart move, from all standpoints, as a baby's eyesight is 20/400 at birth). This moment brings to a close the consummation of Oscar's fantasy, and thus is reborn in a literal sense as well as through purposeful incestuous regression. The unity engendered and its inherent hope are fractured with the cutting of the cord, at which moment the baby immediately starts crying and is taken away, the promise of eternal bondage destroyed thus again, entering the void of an existence deprived of any enduring physical contact, regardless of how many times one reincarnates, even when one enacts their most basic forbidden wishes. On a more controversial note, perhaps Linda experienced the feeling of completeness in herself as well; her desire to possess the phallus of her brother/father becoming alive in a bizarre way. As a female entity she became whole by producing a phallus (satisfying the dispelled notion of "penis envy"), and with a mind-twisting denouement she not only possesses but produces the familial phallus she so longed for, finding peace at last.

The main character (Karol) parades his sorry self through the horrific destitution of identity, propelling his dejected preverbal self through a spiral of rejection which seems to be compounded with every turn he takes. The pigeon defecating on him certainly symbolizes that even the symbolic has termed him worthy only of excrement (as the image of his wedding appears, his beautiful wife running and the pigeons flying away, allowing the horizon to shine light on the newly-born couple). Excrement breeds excrement, he is returned to Poland and emerges in a dump, where he is unceremoniously reminded that the world rejects him, even without any good reason. The tone of the film shies away from just perpetuating silliness and wanton punishment, which makes a lot of sense. The only friend he finds has his own fatalistic journey chiseled in mud (…), the responsibility of which is too overbearing to deal with alone. Clearly Karol, despite being able to encounter wealth, is still completely enamored with his ex-wife; again, their communication was always based on primitive grounding… she said herself that any words of connection / affection would fall on deaf ears, so to speak. The reason for the marriage to end and the manner in which she cruelly punishes him on the phone do indeed sink to the utmost nonverbal level, and in this universe, intelligence is not even ballast. It is these primordial noises that transcend all forms of logic that indeed define his value as not only a husband but a human being. The unwanted wretch he represented to her could not sustain himself despite material gain. Regardless of the denouement and its perverse connotations, Karol did indeed need to destroy his former self in order to create a sense of desire in Dominique; she became attracted to the born-again, fully verbal, sexually potent man, and the climax during the sex scene radiates white light in a demonstration of a new unity being forged. However, he cannot look at her in the aftermath. When his fantasy fell apart in the materialization of his libidinal wishes, he could not maintain himself in this new life in its purest sense, he had to pervert it. In doing so, fantasy and libido are recreated, in a haphazard and messy way. The deadness in the couple is sustained at first by Dominique, then later by Karol, and these 2 "walking corpses" cannot juxtapose themselves chronologically in order to fulfill the requirements of a happy marriage or a mutual separation. In the end, the element of an odd voyeuristic pleasure of creating a 3rd conjugal reality projected somewhere in the unknown future comes into play, but the realization of this is left purely to interpretation.

The symbolism is probably deeper than most people care to look (possibly including me); I would say that developing tunnel-vision (pun intended) regarding certain obsessions people entertain is certainly not a novel concept; everyone has fallen victim to acting on impulse in a sometimes overly aggressive manner, especially when there is guilt or shame to be accounted for brewing in the past, overly zealous defenses bubble to the surface and blind us from deconstructing the obsession and nurturing the observing ego, who would ordinarily red-flag us to when we are doing something potentially harmful. Now, all this to say that the protagonist became fixated on discovering what fate his former romantic partner had encountered, and this hampered any further development of relationships; he clearly would rather be situated in the past than attempt to readapt to present circumstances. Now, from a psychopathic standpoint, vulnerability is to be quickly and mercilessly destroyed. Thus, the kidnapper, showing no emotion whatsoever, takes this broken man through a rather insipidly sadistic journey through the torments of his methodology. In the end, the choice made by our hero is to be confronted by a very real version of his conflict, either abandon the past and its perils or fall victim to it, the consequences of which can be dire. He chose the latter, and his obsession, which already had metaphorical walls keeping it at bay from any real-world influence, ended up creating physical walls, symbolizing how there truly never was any escape from this sordid psychic reality. When faced with the absurdity of our self-imposed chains, what else can one do but laugh?

This means simply that, no matter how hard one tries to delve into the inner workings of another person's mind, it will ultimately prove itself to be a naively valiant but futile effort. In this movie, a girl who has all the makings of a borderline personality or DID patient, in her odd little oblivion, retreats on occasion to a fantasy land, where she can be a singer, loved by everyone surrounding her, and yet has the ego strength to persevere. This is certainly admirable in its own way. Precious's mother can very easily be vilified, and in the end may have evoked sympathy from some people; I can say that the nice little bow they wrapped around her story to explain why she turned into such a feral creature is only the tip of the sunken ship. Trying to understand it simply from that perspective, I would say that yes, there are Oedipal undertones, there was a defended regression and a concretization of symbolic struggles the mother was clearly facing; in attacking her daughter she was attacking vulnerability, devaluing her was her way of not only identifying with whatever nameless aggressor she had in the past, but it was also a way of self-injury by identifying with the vulnerable, frail individual her daughter represented. Not much to say about the disdain shown to the mentally challenged child Precious bred, nor about Mariah Carey's inevitably stereotyped role as a bleeding heart who eventually swallowed the mother's primitive push towards becoming another rejecting external object. Ugh… I think they wanted people to empathize with how this girl overcame the odds to push forth with her life, despite all these horrid adversities facing her. That works too, but we can't understand her world any better than we can the mother's, and it says something of the viewers' ability to withstand realities that go against their own moral code without bringing out projections of their own. It's hard to swallow such egregiously vicious personalities without responding with an equal dose of aggression. But movies are interpretation, and mine is just one more amongst 6 billion.

I think that the concept of retreating into a fantasy life is not ego-alien to most people at some point, as it imbues one with special abilities and allows a much more rigid control over what happens in our lives. I'm guessing this may echo more true in the case of people who, for whatever reason, have less sophisticated social skills and feel threatened by the sometimes daunting task of adapting to this nihilistic postpostmodern world. Now the concept of creating a crystallization of this fantasy life in everyday situations is somewhat plausible, albeit not so much unless we delve into the world of psychosis. Ben seems to first imagine his virtual girlfriend as personified after he takes the pill the bullies feed to him (I'm assuming it was some sort of amphetamine), shifting the paradigm along the lines of substance-induced psychotic disorder, with lingering effects up until the end of the film (even though his mother dismisses the potential severity of the psychic process brewing - after all, psychosis is neurotoxic, so to speak). She is much more concerned with the overarching social adaptation in a sadistic world than achieving any real resolution to underlying causal issues. Technically, the film was visually appealing, the insertion of video game images rendered more palpable the idea of associative thinking that goes on in everyone's minds, you don't have to be on the autistic spectrum to fit into that mold. I didn't love the actor's performance, the build-up was reasonably OK, I didn't expect the twist, and yet it wasn't terribly fulfilling nor incredibly realistic that he wouldn't be vilified horrifically (more so) after staging such a farce. Anyway, the bottom line is that the story, in the end, is one of hopelessness, seen as how he was able to "win" the battle against his persecutors, and yet his ego defenses were so clearly feeble, and the external environment so threatening, that his only choice was to spiral into a psychotic world, so comforting and maladaptive that there may be no way out.

Many, many spoilers here!!!! It took me over 2 years to watch this film after having purchased it. I had seen Irreversible, and was actually afraid of seeing this movie because of not knowing what to expect. Anyway, I loved it. It rings so true to the thoughts of most of us... truly, we see in his racing thoughts the angry mentality that takes over us when the social structure conspires to crush our spirits. Unemployed, in a relationship with an ugly demanding woman (who has furthered the walls around him by carrying his child), away from the only person he loves (his daughter), aging with nothing to show for it, flat broke, and immersed in a system only preoccupied with appeasing the rich and ostracizing the poor. Of course it generates anger, and the blame definitely needs to be attributed to someone. Now, in the case of our friend, he shows very strongly how information overload leads to stagnation, it almost becomes a matter of survival for him to turn life into something monochromatic, some action of his must be undertaken in order to effectively change. Playing the game according to the system has failed him. The movie has a lot of inner dialog, and if you're like me and don't speak French, you will be reading very quickly. This definitely reflects the manic state he is in; he concretely projects his aggression into external objects, and takes action accordingly (seen when he kills his unborn child still in the womb). It unravels into a psychotic state when he becomes delusional about what he needs to do in order to save himself and his handicapped daughter. They must both die so they can truly be free, so they can truly fuse as one. At this point an advisory notice comes onto the screen, stating you have 30 seconds to leave the screening. This is definitely anxiety-provoking for anyone. What follows is definitely disturbing. His daughter is shot from behind, the bullet hole piercing through her neck and she lies on the floor writhing, bleeding from the orifice, resembling the slaughtering of a cow or horse (the image that came to me was of the horse at the beginning of Carne), and he as well states that animals usually die faster, and he can't stand to see her suffer like that. The analogy to irrational beasts is more evident with the fact that she does not speak, thus contorts and dies as a nonverbal creature would. The concreteness of his outside projections becomes more limited, and he decides killing the man who didn't give him a job was less important than carrying out the main plan. In essence, by reenacting his past profession (and thus the definition of his life) in that moment, he literally kills off the 2 key aspects of his existence to date with the 2nd shot (he destroys the image of the slaughtered contorting animal, which he can no longer stand to watch; and he kills his daughter, his link to happiness, and the only thing truly keeping him in this world). Thus, she is shot in the head. He deliberates for a long time before turning the gun on himself and committing suicide, thus destroying the 2nd part of his psyche, the castrated version of himself that no longer has any real reason to remain alive. Eventually we see this was all engendered by his imagination, and he decides to seek the so-called fusion with his daughter in a sublimated form, having sex, a more attractive alternative which also allows psychic survival. After this, there is something of a reverse Oedipal role, she is the mother-figure consoling the crying baby, and the boundaries of the forbidden incestuous relationship are shattered, thus he can find peace. All in all, an excellent film. Don't compare it to Irreversible, they have exceedingly distinct messages.. there do seem to be allusions to it (many references to tunnels) as well as to Noe's new film in the mentioning of the great void of death. Highly recommended, this man is a genius.

I thought this movie was reasonable... it tries really hard to come off as convincing that an impoverished transient born in the most godforsaken land in Brazil could become a master chef at a luxury restaurant.. it's obviously possible, even more when that's what the script says happens. Anyway... the 2 story lines show our man Nonato in jail for an unknown crime and his induction into the world of food. In the process, he falls in love with a prostitute, believing she is pure of heart... Now, we are expected to believe that his murderous rages are unleashed by alcohol, which would lead to assume that he operates at an inhibited level routinely. This is hard to swallow.. he is the most naive and submissive person possible, what the hell is there to be inhibited... Anyway, that's beside the point, everyone has primitive urges that can be released by a diversity of triggers. This is compounded by the idea that he develops (SPOILLLERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR) a plan to poison the alpha male in prison in order to get the top bunk-bed, and does so without the social lubricant. I don't know.. it's a semi-entertaining movie... but still... It also tries to show a symbolic meaning in how he butchered the hooker at the end. Watch it if you can do so for free.