Dionysos

NFA: "The creators themselves were aware that the thematization of violence against women, prostitution, suicide, and assistance in suicide could provoke disapproval, and they consulted the subject matter with representatives of authorities and the church. As a result, a smoother and more melodramatic film was created than it was initially, but it was all in vain. The commission of the FSK (Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle = Voluntary Self-Control - a humorous name for an institution in the country that officially abolished censorship) refused to recommend the film for screening, and the churches declared a boycott against it. Demonstrations and counterdemonstrations were held in front of movie theaters, and the screenings in the movie theaters were loudly disrupted." The most interesting aspect of the film is the retrospective flow of flashbacks and multiple different temporal planes of the past (it sounds more complicated than it actually is) presented by the monologue of a single narrator. The subjectivity and intimacy derived from this is supported by the fact that the narrator does not address us, but rather her object of love. Moreover, he does not respond, so the whole story actually unfolds within the soul and memory of a single person, whom we are compelled to observe from the outside as she pursues reconciliation with her own past and her final acts of freedom - we become judges, evaluating the credibility of the repentance of a person who has fully exposed herself before us, like that ancient predecessor who could only be judged by the judges after she was stripped naked before them.

My review contains a spoiler! The beginning of the 1960s and the golden years of the new wave still found Claude Chabrol in a phase where his films can be classified as "drama, in which someone (violently) dies," unlike later "thrilling murder thriller." Films about people vs. films about killers. The killer in this film appears more as a mysterious and dangerous agent of fate rather than the actual source of genre entertainment (thriller, crime) in the film. Moreover, he carries a metaphorical significance that adds value to the entire previous story. Although the story itself could stand on its own (if, like me, you love the overcrowded illuminated boulevards of Paris in the style of the nouvelle vague, and of course, also Parisians...), the death of the heroine tragically and cynically shows that there is no third alternative between superficial fleeting love (or longer-lasting love, but with a considerable amount of conformity) and true fateful love. And we have seen how the latter unfolds.

It has been said about Robbe-Grillet that: "In his works, we never have a sequence of presences that pass by, but rather a simultaneity of the presence of the past, presence of the present, and presence of the future, which make time terrible and inexplicable." Grillet thus breaks the established flow of film narration, replacing chronology with sequences of overlapping and returning shots, memories, anticipations, and brief flashes of presence that cannot be transitioned into a single reference time. The future has already always occurred, the end comes a quarter hour before the end, and the past is uncertain and perhaps did not happen at all, or it happened differently than the protagonist and the viewer had just experienced. The resulting impression is thus not primarily based on what happens in the shots themselves but on what happens BETWEEN individual shots, on the relationship between these three presences, and on the necessity for the viewer to (re)construct the hero's memories, current experiences, and anticipatory future into a single (yet impossible) unity. The second thing is the unsettling game with space. Changes in temporality lead to changes in the spatial relationships of characters and objects, achieved through repetitive variations of the same environments. Because the past, present, and future (and because Grillet edits between different present times as if it were a normal narration) have taken place (are taking place, will take place...) in the same location, the characters' locations and the course of events are constantly changing. All of this undermines the viewer's confidence in how they are accustomed to understanding storytelling and their observational abilities, making them feel uncertain.

The film captures the reaction of a well-established, calm, exemplary, and capable husband of a beautiful woman, who thought that his marriage was also calm and exemplary, but who was mistaken both in this idea and in the idea that he knows not only his wife but also himself. For we can never know what is happening within a person, even if they appear polite or kind, for example... The reasons for the characters' actions are not easily revealed; their feelings and thoughts are hidden behind a difficult-to-penetrate exterior wall of ingrained behavior, and until the last moment, you cannot guess which emotion will emerge.

Theatrum mundi speaking from behind iron bars, the disturbing force of ideas and actions of characters who, with their consistent uncompromising nature, always shake the world of half-hearted conformists who try to lock them up in asylums or history. One can focus on the expressed difference between the central pair, but it is more interesting to seek their unspoken identities - their dual hatred and submission to nature, nature understood through the eyes of the 18th century, in which the laws and natural rights were supposed to be found, on which every future free and happy world was supposed to stand. Sade is the one who hates nature for its indifferent omnipotence, and precisely because of its power, before which there is no escape, he submits to it in search of its greatest certainty: the pleasure of the body. Conversely, Marat, who decided to implement the laws of natural equality and freedom even by using violence and means that contradict the asceticism, strictness, and austerity that deny nature itself - he thus tries to escape nature in order to confirm it: in both cases, nature and its destructive force triumph over the immobility of the world on the "right" side of the bars, which doesn't even realize its own bars in life, society, and politics. /// I don't know what some viewers expect from a filmed theater performance, but here the script of the play and the performances of the actors are excellent, and the film is also complemented by a high-quality camera, giving it a cinematographic value that cannot be achieved in the theater.

I usually hardly notice it, but here on FilmBooster, there is sometimes a column called "Tags" for movies that somehow managed to characterize the message of the film: police, journalists, intrigue, false accusation, media, and injustice. Reality is always different from how it appears to us, but the police and the media are going in the opposite direction: their perception of things constitutes its reality. Therefore, we as viewers can indeed observe the colorful "reality" of the film narration (which, like any other reality, is open to various interpretations, from the authors' left-wing engagement to other opinions) but the reality created by the unified police/media machinery allows for only one perspective. It is that perspective of black-and-white shots from secret service cameras and (back then) black-and-white newspaper photographs and headlines that remind people in the 21st century that you can become a terrorist overnight not only through your own actions.

Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev are traveling on a train. Suddenly, the train stops. Stalin asks, "Why are we stopping?" The engineers ran out of coal. "Shoot the engineers!" The engineers were shot, and the train continues to be stationary. Khrushchev asks, "Why are we stopping?" "They shot the engineers." "Rehabilitate the engineers!" The engineers were rehabilitated, and the train continues to be stationary. Then Brezhnev stands up, pulls the curtains, and says, "What are you all doing? Let's pretend we're moving..." /// This film works great not only as a study of bullying in the military but also as – and it deserves applause precisely because it can do it through its main theme - a mirror of its time. The authors created a depressingly monotonous and isolated world of a military train, where time stopped and where endless movement towards an infinitely distant goal (the war will probably never end, the train will never reach the prison...) mirrors the motionless world outside, which long ago lost its utopian goal. And it is precisely through the views through the train window that the creators hid the main impressions of the transition between two epochs - the total decay of (not only ruling) values; apathy and rigidity, but which rather amounted to hypnotized waiting for the cataclysm, which nobody thought would come, but everyone knew that it would have to come; in extreme cases, an escape to new values (waiting for the apocalypse and a return of God, emphasizing the symbol of the cross, or nihilism in sex). The final passage says so much more than it could if we’d only stuck to the theme of bullying: there is no escape from the train. /// The chosen form perfectly corresponds to the content - the predominance of claustrophobic imitating details, a monochromatic image, and slow-paced transitions between shots, all giving birth to a feverish and unbearable timeless and surface rigidity, under which the catharsis of a new era is being born.

For a Central European, it is certainly valuable as an insight into the functioning of a Japanese patriarchal family, otherwise an excellent geological exploration of all-time sediments within one Japanese personality. The viewer is confronted with the male character's thoroughly personal search for lost time, whose retrospections propel us towards the goal just like Shinkansens and ships on the present plane. It is touching to observe the patient's discourse - yes, the patient's, because the "narrative" recollection of the main protagonist speaks to us just like a patient from a psychoanalytic couch - constantly revolving around old traumas, in the depths of the past, constantly dissected and cut up into new segments and reanalyzed. Touching - always precisely at the moment when the character examines the past, the present eludes him. The passivity that begets paralysis by the past is permanent for the main character - he is always forced to exchange today's satisfaction for (at best) the satisfaction of some problem in the past. (Example: Masuo has the opportunity to obtain the object of his desire, Satsuko, but instead goes to resolve the will of his father, who has been dead for 10 years; subsequently, he has the opportunity to obtain the object of his love, Ritsuko, and instead he deals with his deceased mother.)

In one aspect, this is a non-traditional Ferreri film: the maestro of the cinematic metaphor, in the sense that the stories and characters of his films usually function "only" as an embodiment of a metaphor, through which Ferreri builds an analogy between the film world and the real world. He went a step further here. In the opening scene, he let the chosen metaphor for this film resonate directly. The viewer does not have to "only" extract Ferreri's chosen metaphor (the principle by which the plot unfolds and carries a message) from the observed actions of the characters but can contemplate to what extent it corresponds to the outlined "program" in the beginning. Here, in my opinion, two possibilities present themselves – the first is that we note that the main character truly experiences a radical rejection of the alienated world, an escape from it through a rebellious gesture. The second option, which is more interesting, is that we note that he has just completely merged that alienated image with himself. If the "outer world transitions into the inner being of a person," then violence (industrial and military machinery, where he is employed) and the romantic escape from the mundane life on a luxurious sailboat (a promotional phantasm), etc. will indeed seem like internalized fulfillments of the "qualities" of the (post)industrial society, to which a specific individual has decided to commit.

The main protagonist, an American doctor (Paul McIsaac) in his middle years, exiled voluntarily in Lisbon, Portugal, is haunted by bitter memories and disgust for the world and himself - he drowns his bitterness in alcohol and cynicism amidst an unfriendly and poor industrial suburb of the city, where the people hate Americans as the doctor hates himself and his surroundings. The monotonous life of a man without a future is interrupted by the arrival of his son (Vincent Gallo) whom he’d never met and who set out to find his father after his mother's death. Will the encounter of two men with disturbed experiences lead to a change in their lives? /// Kramer focuses more on the atmosphere that permeates the locations and the plot than on the story: the dirty and poor Lisbon with its already strong genius loci (similar to In the White City by A. Tanner in many ways) is transformed by the director and cinematographer into a symbolic edge of the world, the end of all expectations of a bitter individual who chooses his place of defeat in mournful melancholy. The paralyzing fluidity of the foreign environment and aimlessness envelop the actions of the main character, whose only chance is the element of fundamental foreignness towards the present and a reminder of the past, the time when he could still live. The return of the lost son - a happy ending? /// In addition, Kramer masterfully disrupts the otherwise coldly realistic flow with surprising and personal sequences, breaking down the barrier between the viewer and fiction and reality.