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Anatomie d'une chute (2023)
Triadic Point of View Thriller
The film seeks to coalesce three totally convincing points of view on the possible origin of a man's death, a death that becomes more mysterious the more one looks at all the puzzling circumstantial pieces surrounding it, where, after a first all-inclusive glance, the conclusion seems obvious.
Anyone watching this film has a license to take it anywhere you want, and it could be a right or wrong interpretation, and it won't matter, for it comes down to a film portraying the many dimensions to a mysterious legal notion, "mitigating circumstances", what this film explores in depth, more than any film I've seen.
For me, after an experience at 11 years old, when my mom left our vicious dad, I could have gone with her, but I had certainty of her love, and none for my dad. So I chose to stay and take care of him, to win his love, to get proof of his love, what turned out to be a bad decision. He just got more brutal, almost killing me three times.
That's where I entered the film, inside a child's desperation to be loved at all costs, a child with a Dostoevskian sensibility who thinks in ways no adult would ever be able to discern, what makes for an interesting child with an interesting plan.
The Menu (2022)
Smorgasboard of Existential Horrors
I will not go into the details of the narrative in this masterwork. Instead I'll list themes that came to mind while watching it, not necessarily intended by the director, for one can in this film travel to the end of any human universe in any direction, what I sense is a radical conclusion to this Age of Self Actualization that cost us our true identities in adopting transient, surface, need-fulfilling identities, contributing to the total disintegration of Western Civilization before our very eyes.
The anthropologist Margaret Mead over a hundred years ago became obsessed with finding what is true of every culture since the foundation of human consciousness, long before religion and politics took over defining existence for us. And the first universal she discovered, in both the most advanced and the most primitive cultures, was the concept of Karma, which means it is intrinsic to human existence, not instilled by surface cultural norms. This means, of course, that no one gets away--ever. But how do we visualize this horrid phenomenon in a visual-audio narrative display?
We are reminded of this gnawing, innate Karmic condition constantly by such catch phrases as "Instant Karma's going to get you", "What goes around, comes around" and "What you sow you'll reap". But how does an artist portray this horrid understanding?
Nathaniel Hawthorne, together with Edgar Allen Poe, introduced to American culture the genre of existential horror related to guilt, sin, evil, retribution and, finally, confession of those sins hidden in the dark for a lifetime of rabid self-actualization. It would be nice if a director would provide all these themes simultaneously that are festering inside this paradigm of meaning right up to its horrid finale, the individual confession that seeps into consciousness and opens us up to a collective confession of what we have been since the foundations of the world.
And then there is Flannery O'Connor who gave us in a short-story masterwork, "A Good Man is Hard to Find", the most explicit narrative engaging us in a grandmother facing in singular, absolute focus the Angel of Death, which inspired a friend of the killer named The Misfit to compliment the old woman after her death for being so lucid, thoughtful and philosophical in the moments leading to her sure death. And the Misfit responds, "She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."
A half century ago, during a time I was investigating the darkest realms of the human soul, after exiting a ride at Disneyland called "It's A Small World After All", I wrote a lengthy essay titled "It's a Sadomasochistic World After All". My sense was the Thanatos Syndrome was now culturally on par with the Eros Syndrome, and it was becoming impossible to sense which would win out during this postmodern age, a cultural hell of radical self-absorption (a social epidemic of solipsism) of our own creation throughout the West. But after the deconstruction (disintegration) is complete, will it finally rid us of the Thanatos Syndrome?
La truite (1982)
An Illusive Rainbow
Joseph Losey established himself as a gifted filmmaker in the late '40s with The Boy with Green Hair, my favorite film from childhood. The thing about genuine artists is they can't kick the truth. Regardless how wayward they become in their obsessive lifestyles or imaginations, their deepest obsession remains with the truth. Losey would eventually make in the early '60s what was up to that point the best film exploration of the sado-masochistic impulse, The Servant, with the great film actor, Dirk Bogarde, and during that same period the effects of child sacrifice in The Damned. He would later explore the very dark dead-end of multiple sexual partners as a way of life in his film adaptation of Mozart's Don Giovanni (1979). But his great masterpiece, in my view, is his penultimate film, La Truite (The Trout, 1985). He must have experienced great satisfaction in knowing that every critic missed the central theme and all the deeper nuances of what he was conveying in the film, most thinking that it was simply a comic film about a cold-hearted bitch, played perfectly by the ever-surprising Isabelle Huppert. I will not dwell on the complexity of what this film is about, only to mention that it involves a precocious child, Frederique, who discovers much too early in life the sado-masochistic matrix of the world and begins her trek on finding ways to adapt to it while not allowing a core innocence to be destroyed by it, to keep an upper-hand in distance, a postmodern Fanny Price who is elevated not by dominance but by a detachment that, in its severance from God, borders on being the ultimate act of cruelty, indifference. She keeps in tow a hyper-sensitive, self-destructive husband who is gay and who, in discovering the dead-ends of sado-masochistic delight, is devastated every second of every moment by looking long and hard into the reality of love lost in the only territory he knows, the valley of the void where he commits to drinking himself to death. The heroine played by Ms. Huppert has only one ally, an elderly Japanese man who has achieved a similar detachment in his life, and they become spiritual friends. This film is not about a bitch, but about "misdirected transcendency" (Girard) in a world that is severed from God.
High-Rise (2015)
High Heaven
High-Rise will eventually be recognized as the first definitive cinematic exploration of where we actually reside in our postmodern world. Radical Autonomy, the ethos of postmodernism, is now the norm of culture. All forms of actual community have been destroyed, especially the cornerstone of all expansive forms of social community, the nuclear family (Yorgo Lathimos' masterpiece, Lobster, focuses exclusively on this element, yet his hero is, unlike Dr. Laing, totally oblivious, but is finding his way haphazardly). And in High-Rise, pregnant Helen is the last woman/person standing in defending this cornerstone, this Alamo of hers in the belly of the Beast (the Building as metaphor for the culture we are now imprisoned in).
Helen stands valiantly alone in her battle, a Don Quixote absent the fantastical egotism, staring realistically and directly into the pit of uncompromising alienation all around her, but she will find an ally in the Great Liberator, Dr. Laing, the beating heart of the film, a real glimpse at hope, not sentimental rubbish, revealing the basic failing of postmodernism beneath its clutter of hedonistic excess: a world programmed solely for each individual to get his/her needs met, setting everyone off and against each other in selfish paroxysms.
The visionary architect of the film is appropriately named Royal— that's Ayn-Randian Royalty, the fully actualized visionary architect who will, as the greatest autonomous artist in history, restore what is grand, as King and God—towering above all other artists in a ruling progressive "professional class" determined to kill the past to create the future. His determination is to restore the essence of what the Western World sacrificed to gain radical autonomy: true, not pretend, community. That's the heart of the great existential joke of the film, and what makes the film a true postmodern satire of epic proportions, and why each repeated viewing brings on ever more hilarity. For example, it is deemed by the upper- floor residents that children should not be allowed in the pool because they can't control their bladders (the upper classes have actualized their autonomy and simply would not submit to any demands from any other, especially a child, so why even have one?), and every time the cameraman returns to filming the pool, you can see how editors bled yellow into the water where the children swim. Trust me—it does get funnier on every repeated viewing!
The professional class (progressives) harnessed most of its power from the psychoanalytic movement, what had Kafka scream, "No more psychology!", and the Psychiatrist of High-Rise, Talbot, clarifies Kafka's concern, a psychology of self- centeredness in the radical promotion of self over everything, including every other, including children ("I can't be there for my child until I get myself together, dammit!"), and including history itself!
The basic distinction between a liberal and a progressive is the latter seeks to kill the past to create its vision of a future, independent of all other influences, to make it pure! And the liberal seeks always to remember the past to avoid the existential horrors we get looped around in throughout history! And of all the professionals in the film, Richard Wilder comes closest to being an old school liberal force, but in whose animalistic pursuit of the truth in a concrete jungle turns himself into his own worst enemy, in the end fulfilling the Building's demand that he rape and murder to fully actualize his radical sense of justice! He is assigned by the Building to demote Charlotte who has gotten far too comfortable in her successful orchestrations of parties at all levels of engagement, and why a quick bond develops between her and the protagonist, Dr. Laing, both accomplished navigators, but Charlotte navigates inside the Beast to acquire maximum benefits, and Laing comes from a world of broad knowledge and seeks not only to move comfortably, but to seek restoration of nuts and bolts of true humanity in the process (an attitude glimpsed for flitting moments inside once suffocated tear-drops).
Wilder is a man engrossed in a mission to uncover evil and promote the good, but he lives simultaneously in both worlds, the ancient liberal world of honor and fighting doggedly to reveal the truth, and the postmodern world where everyone is out for him/herself, and damn the truth in process!, and in his animal pursuit of truth and justice, he is taken over by the malevolence of the Building, and finally realizes the Building (postmodern culture) was always more powerful than he, and his dark side ends in manifesting absolutely in the power he utilizes to defeat the Building! Wilder more than anything wants to win, and so he ends in sacrificing his wife and children and his very humanity for this bold adventure into wining, not loving.
Dr. Laing is the postmodern warrior par excellence. He not only has embraced his Iliad, but ignores an Odyssey (no home to return to). Charlotte chooses for Laing when she throws the picture of him and his dead sister to the floor, the last remnant of Laing's delusory clinging to a world that has passed away. He will not be conned by any peripheral, especially from the "progressive class" and its relentless Kantian maze of dysfunctional morality and ethics, although because he and Royal are both absolute visionaries, they share an affection for each other in this regard. But Laing, like Helen, is no Don Quixote trapped in egotism. He is willing to strip away every peripheral to arrive at the nuts and bolts of what is truly true about the human condition. Wilder gave him all he knew, and so did Charlotte and Royal and everyone else, and now it is left to Laing who knows where the heart of restoration begins, with everyone loving the baby born into a genuine community, the first incipient model of nuclear family restoration unto fully actualized community.