Reviews

First the bad: I found the relationships among the girls and between the madam and the girls to be somewhat one-dimensional and strain credibility. Bonello seemed to want to downplay any conflict in order to emphasize 'sisterhood,' but I found it hard to believe everyone for the most part got along with everyone else and seemed to look out for one another - especially a bunch of women. All the women/girls just seemed generally so 'nice,' spiritually pure, and well-intentioned. The sense of community was idealized and aestheticized to the point where some important, more nuanced aspects of reality were lost.

The ending was also kind of odd. The girls in the house were high-class courtesans with a mostly affluent customer base. Wasn't that a point Bonello was trying to make? And yet in the end they were paralleled with modern-day streetwalkers. It's not like street prostitutes didn't exist back in the day either, but the house girls were different. They're highly trained from a young age - not to fulfill just men's physical needs, but mental and emotional ones as well. High-roller escorts exist today too, and if anything, they would probably be more like them today, than streetwalkers. It's strange Bonello in the closing scenes decided to upend what he just spent the last 2 hours describing.

I think these are two significant flaws of the work.

The good: The Woman Who Laughs was no doubt the 'center' of the film that was trying very hard to be 'centerless,' Flowers of Shanghai-ish. Which was not necessarily a bad thing, as I found her story to be very interesting and moving. Especially in the scene toward the end when she cried the 'tears of sperm' - extremely imaginative, poignant, and profound - and reminded me why I started to watch Bonello's films in the first place after watching Tiresia. I think that moment alone is worth the admission.

Tiresia was nearly flawless throughout and worked as a whole. I didn't really like The Pornographer or On War. Was it just a fluke, a flash of genius? Bonello is still a young director, with only a few full features under his belt, so I would like to wait and see what else he can do.

First, let's not talk about the cop-out 'reminiscing/fantasy' sequences that practically intercut every other scene in this man-gets-into-some-deep-subterranean-trouble, now a veritable subgenre in the supposed one-man-body-horror category--come on, if you want to do claustrophobic, then DO claustrophobic (cf Hitchcock, Polanski, Lynch)--because, I suspect, Boyle himself knows there isn't much clothing on the proverbial emperor here: Nothing to film here, folks. And nothing to see.

It's certainly not unexpected, albeit still somewhat bemusing, to see several audience members walk out of the theater, scratching their heads while mumbling to each other: 'What was the point of THAT?' Yes, what WAS the point? Let's look at it, shall we? He got what he deserved, right? Either you read that, as he said himself (perhaps as the hallucinations really began setting in), as 'everything in his life has led him to this point,' recognition of self in world, lesson learned via trauma etc, etc...or, maybe even with a tad of Schadenfreude, we can all claim with the Universe that the a##hole was put in his place...

Doesn't matter. You'd be wrong.

And this where the film manages actually to get somewhat interesting, and mildly subversive. (And props to Dan if this were intended, but I doubt it.) THE REAL FILM, a la Hamlet, in the film is the flashback sequences (whose frequency of occurrence here is no accident). In particular, those ones involving his childhood and adolescence. I love how there was just a nuanced, near-missed undertone of paternal resentment in the sequences involving his father, who sets up his nerdy, weakling son (the glasses/contacts--a Kleinian partial object if there ever was one) to be an inevitable failure, a disappointment (the rock therefore is really just the paternal superego). Maternal absence? Check. (The link to China and the global economy via the pocketknife-gift couldn't have been more perfect and made more explicit here--but more on that in a bit.) The Trauma in the film is not the arm caught in the rock, which is simply one more emanation from the Real Traumatic Core, obliquely referred to in the reminiscing sequences about his *SISTER*. If you watch carefully (the piano-playing scenes, and how later he said he missed her wedding--both first-person, camcorded), there is just a subtle hint of incest between him and the sister, and between the father and the sister. The Real Trauma here is the jealousy between him and his father, and the fact that his father CASTRATED him as a result--which is simply repeated and reenacted here by the explicit 'dismemberment' scene. (By the way, are we supposed to hear the American Online dial-up tone every time we cut into bone? I've never seen so many blatantly serial product placements in one film in my life--but more on 'the global economy' later.) Never confuse message with code. Films often tell us one thing, but show us another. When he finally dismembers himself and breaks free (physically speaking), what's the first thing he does? Take a picture. Ah, the invincibility of human beings on Earth, the superior indomitability of the human spirit (echoing the song in the beginning), literally reified for the masses to watch here--I kid not, the audience literally cheered, at that exact moment. What's all that hullabaloo about understanding one's place in the world? Respect for nature, the universe...? You can forget it now; Americans (and the colonialist Brits) like to WIN. And whom does he run into first in his 'escape?' The prototypical middle-class nuclear family--Mommy (Third World, 'untapped' resources, Earth, material), sonny (petit bourgeois), and Daddy (the State): the Oedipal structure of the flow of capital is re-affirmed once again. (Does the helicopter remind anybody a little too much of the last scene in Lord of the Flies?) It's truly gratifying to be able to re-insert oneself into the order of consumption-meaning-social network, isn't it? (The truth is, our protagonist has never left it.) Where everything makes sense again--and the audience cheered.

On the surface, the films says: Global Capitalism Bad. In reality, everything it shows demonstrates its unconscious flipside--its absolute and unwavering, total support of it (the split-screen diptych at the end of the cave paintings and the global consuming 'masses' today, couldn't show this more clearly), that it's nothing if not the natural order of things. God=Capital. C'est la vie.

Another film of late about a man being trapped underground is similar: What it says--Terrorism Bad. What it shows--terrorists are people too (the main character actually says something to this effect), and the American bureaucracy (shown to be maddeningly ineffective, indifferent, and eerily Kafkaesque) actually DESERVES terrorism??? In this sense, this particular film is in fact quite radical (while appearing conservative in nature), whereas 127 Hours is extremely conservative (while being liberal in appearance).

Films like these, so empty and devoid of any content, really act as the perfect vessel for a bunch of calcified, subterranean ideologies.

Watch them. All you have to do is look.