It would take too long to unpack the complexities of the plot alone (and spoil the fun), so I will describe the experience. Here is a film that revels in its artificiality AND hyperrealism
m to create a world with a syntax of dreams and a hard to summarize texture of reality. Sounds like empty word salad, but this film works on many planes. Greenway comes from painting as David Lynch does, but from the Baroque end. He doesn't bog you down in intellect-insulting fine artist jargon. He only wants to make you think between the plot turns and pretty camera shots. So much of the film unravels as a mystery but becomes crystal clear only in memory. He's giving you the sensation of studying a wide body of different work and calling attention to the field itself, the sum of its parts. Thats so hard to do and very rare to find in British "art films".
Because we are getting an authentic look at a local mindset, exploring the fringe thoughts of a society that has isolated its artists, thinkers and misfits. These characters represent the core of the unseen world by their madness from it. So little character is explained but they all ring true and familiar. These are the unique personas that we meet when we leave the masses. We love them but we're also afraid of and for them. In the end, they are all victims of a gray morality and they have a random gray way of policing it. Its unfair and cruel, but we come across this kind of brutal violence everyday. How Greenaway captured this abstract sense is astounding.
Its the blackest of black comedy and the most human of tragedies. I feel the story is universal thanks to its stripped down ingredients and its immersion in nature and timeless artifacts. Its so clearly from 1988 but if someone told me it was from 1968 or 2018, I'd buy it. This film is a dream. You forget its details but the message sticks.
*I rewatched this special film and found more to appreciate. I still won't spoil the events of the plot in any way, but the influences are clearer to me and the themes resonate even more.
The overwhelming production, how it turns English hillside into an elaborate, living theatrical stage, integrates every element for the simple function of progression in numbers, progression period. I assume Greenaway was toying with the theatrical aesthetic of Gesamkuntwerk to set up his rejection of it in "The Cook, The Thief...", which is a pure work of Brectian "separation of the elements".
Greenaway must be a big fan of Bertolt Brecht (who I'm researching currently) as this film ascribes to his ideal of Epic "Dialectic" Theatre. We feel so removed from the action, which is never too realistic nor too surreal. This film is firmly moving towards full-on Epic theatre, but it has much more Naturalism than Greenaway's following films. It has an intricate, if small plot and doesn't veer too Romantic. I assume it was an experiment to merge these polar ideas of theatre and see which works better. Is it integrated successfully or does it work best deconstructed into material pieces?
Figure that Greenaway toyed with these aesthetic games while also rendering an ambitious study of the male horror of matriarchy in radical bluntness. Is it a feminist battle cry? A warning to patriarchy? Both? Or just a dark satire of the battle of the sexes?
**I have to add a 3rd section because this film has haunted me all year and I find new layers to meditate with. I think the central metaphors and title refer to the unique passive violence of women. The only way they can fight back is to slowly kill you. They lie, seduce, plot and frame men out of some gender-based structuralism society has left them in reaction to patriarchy. The male victims of the film never wrong the women in any fatal way, but they trigger that omnipresent Father Complex in all women. This is such a bold, ruthless and honest examination of the female problem of sex & violence. How is this film not more heralded?
No comments:
Post a Comment