Broken Dolls is maybe my favorite Franco film. It's his most personal, following the family of an incestual father who has damaged his aging family members sexually (a lesbian sadist mother, a whore wannabe-Aryan daughter, a transgender simpleton daughter and the passive voyeur of abuse and sex in... Franco's viewer) creating in the film's form a dark meditative erotic film that is only erotic in that it's not real, thanks to Jess' Id-developed "dream" aestheticism. But the subtext is so personal that it never turns pornographic but flows as a harsh analysis of the psychosexual and Hegelian dialectic, thus being a true work of Marxist rebellion to the white patriarchal binaries of Romanticism, religion, modernism, structuralism and all of the ruling empire moralities of hate, inequality and evil. In desecrating his father, Franco finds late in life catharsis to his original issues with women and intimacy.
This film, while professing a Jungian study of family archetypes, is one of the most Freudian works of cinema with Jess casting his own girlfriend as his mother. In this way, he draws scary parallels to his own father to address his conflicted relationship to him. The final scene is one of the most moving I've ever seen.
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