Antichrist from Lars von Trier

<

Interesting is the only word I could describe this work. Nobody wants to see this, who is not ready for seeing shocking pictures, trangression and extreme behaviour. So you want to see that and then it is not that bad, you get it but not only, they speak, they analyse themselves, they fuck and so on.
To be frank I have always the feeling that a lot of directors after long years of psychoanalysis need, at the end, to make a movie where an analyst get a main role. So I have to pay eight Euros to see a movie which I do not really understand but who helped one director to deal with his mother who was a kind of castrating him as a child. So, Lars von Trier, is he talking about mothers in general or about his one in particular? Is it a gore version of “La maman et la putain” (a masterwork of the Nouvelle Vague where Jean Eustache describes the difficulty for the men to see in the same woman the holy mother and the sinner whore)? Or is it just about the communication problems between men and women?
The very well structured movie starts with Charlotte Gainsbourg losing by accident her only child and then Willem Dafoe (her husband and analyst), trying to make her recover confronting her to her fear, suffering and grief. Several comparisons of the “Nature” in flora and fauna with the human “Nature” shows how the feminine part can be cruel, obsessed with control and in the same time self destructive. Then in a hysterical surrounding “à la Hieronymus Bosch”, the burning of the evil woman implicates the rebirth of all the repressed children.
Wahoo, a kind of hardcore at the end; is it politically correct? Or is it just Philippe Claude fantasy? His only advice, see it if you study psychoanalysis or art from the middle age because it is so incredibly well played. Otherwise it is not enough gore to be entertaining!
P.S You don’t need the big screen, the DVD will do.

Das weisse Band (The white ribbon) from Michael Haneke

I am very sorry for the Germans but a movie from Michael Haneke who wins the Palme d or in Cannes must have something to tell about National Socialism. And I guess this one is no exception but it is one of the best I ever saw.
First, I heard a long time ago about a Jewish writer who sat the theory that the Shoah could only have happened in the third Reich and nowhere else; even though Italy and Spain followed the fascism lines they didn t go so far. When that theory is not proved, this essay could be a kind of confirmation of it. Why civilized Europeans became suddenly Nazis?
Michael Haneke finds an explication in their childhood. He describes the daily life of normal kids from a little village in Germany and how they were traumatized constantly by too much discipline, religion, violence and abuse. The film finishes in 1914, when all those kids are around ten, so they would have been potential electors for the Fuhrer.
This is not the direct subject of the movie and it is where it is genius. For 144 minutes you do not get bored one minute because there is a kind of suspense, enigma to solve where everybody in the village is suspect and nobody find the real responsible of all the violence. There is no answer to it because the only guilty one is the society, everybody in the village who detains power abuses of it in a legal way and is a victim of it in an illegal way. Do not miss the key scene where the Baroness explains why she wants her children to grow up far away from the village, in Italy.
Mastery directed, mastery played and mastery put in decor! Germans will remember stories about their grand-parents and the rest of the world will be more careful about the education of their children, and the need to bring them humanity and individuality!
Bravo!

Shotgun Stories from Jeff Nichols

A beautiful movie about irresponsible men and responsible women



Since few months I am very attracted to the beauty of the boys of the street. The girls in the street always do something; they are always late, run somewhere or carry shopping bags. The boys on their side, at least when the evening starts, look just bored, organize some circuit in the city between late delis to buy the new beer and wait for something to happen but it never does. They just look like they would be ready to do things but they never do, there is the possibility of manhood, but it is too complicated. Those boys are much more in the streets of Berlin than in the streets of Paris and they look sexy, their useless virility tickles my senses and make me wonder how to use it or even abuse of it!
Shotgun stories is a movie just about those boys. They drink beer all the time, they try to repair things but it never works, so they drink new beers. The surrounding is very white trash, people lives in trailers, in their van or at the best in a mortgaged ugly house.
There are no daughters in this family, the father will have sons, and he will name them kid, boy and son and they will have at their time boys too. Then, comes the fratricide Greek tragedy! An obsession for the symmetry just does the rest. Every brother has a half brother which is his reflection and complement but they were grown up (by the mothers) to hate themselves. They can move only in a triangular composition and sometimes the reflection of a brother is a nephew.
Some will escape to the tragedy; they ll leave the cursed boredom land to go to the city. When it is not really a happy end, at least there is some hope!
Like every movie about the boredom, the movie theater is almost indispensable otherwise you start to sleep in your sofa but the torrid homoerotism will keep awake some in front of the DVD.

P.S Don t miss the scene where one teenager charges a shotgun on his crotch between his legs in close up. Yes, that s the whole film, men trying to express their manhood but taking the wrong way!