John Cope wrote:As I think about this now (and frankly I'm doing more of that than I really want to) the reason the issue oldsheperd brings up is an issue to me at all has to do with Noe's overall emphasis. It prompts an ultimately rather useless speculation on our part. Because as I reflect on the end of EtV I can only think that he's trying to suggest that the love of these siblings overcomes everything else, trumps the noxious environment surrounding them and contextualizing them, the one I for one can't get past. If we were then to wonder why we need to be exposed to so much of that environment one could assume he might argue that the power of their implicit love is enough to make up for any seeming presentational imbalance; that, in fact, the excess it overcomes is the whole point, hence the necessity of the imbalance. And, of course, we get the requisite establishing orphan narrative in order to further bulwark that position. In other words, this is a sad state of affairs, isn't it?
The problem I have with the film is that the city looks
fantastic and a very exciting place to be in! (Though to a British viewer the opening walk through the city may feel strangely similar to a certain
Channel 4 ident!) Even the strip clubs and back alleys are aesthetically beautiful (as in a way, though it might be crass to ignore the action that unfolds in that location to comment on the set, was the central tunnel in Irreversible. I particularly remember the
music video for
Irreversible which used Bangalter's Stress theme whilst the camera roamed up and down that tunnel). You could almost suggest that the city is reflecting the psychology of the characters, if there were any discernible psychology displayed by them in the first place to be reflected.
Which I think reflects badly on our cast of characters - as with many of the characters in the previous films they're really more responsible for causing and then diving further into their downward spirals themselves rather than having been driven that way by outside factors (with the rape in
Irreversible perhaps being the one exception), and mostly they're already irretrievably damned at the point at which we encounter them (with the hard-won, tenuous, maybe-salvation of the butcher and his daughter at the end of
Seul contre tous being a stand out exception).
I don't really feel anything for the brother and sister here, or the French friend, or Victor, or Mario - they all make really stupid decisions and pay for them but without ever seeming to grow or learn anything from their experiences. They just go back to repeating the same cycle all over again. Maybe that's Noe's point, but its a depressingly futile one which seems itself undermined when combined with all the adolescent philosophising about the Book of the Dead, the cliched Kodak moments, etc.
I don't think Noe is condeming the world around them for 'forcing' them into their predicaments (Oscar is just dealing drugs because having a 'real job' is "slavery" - just one of the many superficial insights we are thrown in the scene leading up to Oscar's death. Linda's annoyance at his slacking is also undermined by her 'real job' being stripping). At the same time any small connection with the characters is lost by those moments where it feels as if Noe breaks the fourth wall and cracks an incredulous smile at the way the audience are actually trying to empathise with these characters on screen (as with the
Destricted short, I got the impression that about halfway to three quarters through the film Noe is just as amazed as the rest of us that anyone is going to have put up with the film for this long and just seems to be baiting the remaining viewers into leaving. Though the chance to continue experiencing
BUF's visual effects showreel is just enough to keep going until the bitter end)
But that puts me in the awkward position of seeming to say that I can't buy love overcoming filth.
That is where I found the essential futility of the film to lie. To make that kind of argument of 'love overcoming filth' you need a powerfully argued, or at least compelling, narrative. If the characters aren't up to the task of satisfyingly fulfilling that kind of role in the narrative then that is the fault of the film for not developing them, or backing them up. Which leads me to consider that the film is actively undermining them, or at least not making them sympathetic or easily relatable to in any way (they just feel like blank slates to me, except sometimes they have to 'act' angry or upset), something which left me thinking that there was more of a possessive neediness than 'true love' between the characters - a fear of being alone that transcends death, with the irony being that even when you are able to perform the ultimate act of being reborn through your sibling you still end up a completely separate being from them, unable to ever make contact (I assume that this baby is going to have serious mother-fixation issues when he grows up!)
This also I think relates to the way that film is also seeming to be undermining its special effects, such as the many 'moving towards the light' moments (or the presumably revelatory plunges into orificies) which move past the moment of impact and get drawn out into irrelevancy and redundancy. Add this to the way that I think the film is structured seemingly to make the audience remember that a certain scene took place in a certain location at a certain time but which seems to be jumbled up in the film in order to prevent the audience from easily being able to identify at which point a particular moment or scene occurred in the course of the film itself, and there seems to be the suggestion of the film being created around 'significant' but fleeting moments that have stuck in the character's mind, whether they led to any important action or revelation or (more often) did not.
