Maybe if mankind was given a completely new slate on a different planet, starting civilization over again, it would still end up in the darkness of ignorance, superstition, and warfare. Maybe man lives in an absurd condition, forever groping, and the oppressively dark visuals in the film and the delirious raving of its characters mirror that. I don't know. I just could never connect with this, though I really wanted to like it, and appreciate the struggle director Andrzej Zulawski had in making it (the ending scene of him in a window reflection is truly heartfelt). On the other hand, the way the voiceover bits over periods of lost footage was done, showing things like regular people taking an escalator, was pretty amateurish, and the only real points he scored with me were for some of the visuals in the final half hour.
The plot to this film is far too obscure, without a lot of connective tissue in between characters chaotically raving on in religious mania. Seriously, the script is 98% sheer gibberish. There's lots of shrieking, lots of madness, and lots of emotional excess - and no rationality or introspection of any kind to balance it out even a bit. The commentary seems to be in the raving itself, as opposed to what anyone is actually saying, and it's a pretty dark, nihilistic view. Just following the characters or what rituals they're going on about is tough, and the film has an incredible denseness to it that made it very hard to endure for 157 minutes. When it ended, I was relieved that what amounted to a torture session was over.
The plot to this film is far too obscure, without a lot of connective tissue in between characters chaotically raving on in religious mania. Seriously, the script is 98% sheer gibberish. There's lots of shrieking, lots of madness, and lots of emotional excess - and no rationality or introspection of any kind to balance it out even a bit. The commentary seems to be in the raving itself, as opposed to what anyone is actually saying, and it's a pretty dark, nihilistic view. Just following the characters or what rituals they're going on about is tough, and the film has an incredible denseness to it that made it very hard to endure for 157 minutes. When it ended, I was relieved that what amounted to a torture session was over.