Change Your Image
demetrio-pereira
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
L'année dernière à Marienbad (1961)
Metacinema at its finest
Art reaches its peak when it becomes self-conscious. Movie-wise, the best example is perhaps Fellini's "8 1/2". In this strict sense, "Marienbad" might be Resnais' "8 1/2".
A character becomes self-conscious about his own character-nature and tries to drag another character out of the château (out of the movie itself) where they've been trapped for more than a year (two years? a decade? since 1961?).
Every time one watches "Marienbad", those same characters meet again, and one of them is already sick of the same rooms and the same greyness. They're like statues, frozen in time. Time, indeed, doesn't matter, as the narrator puts it.
The woman's dress is "dark, perhaps black" because how can he tell, if he's stuck in a 2D black & white, endless, repetitive avant-garde flick? The "husband" always wins the game - he warns people about it, he knows he's been winning all this time and will continue to win, as long as people keep watching. Each time you hit the play button, that guy adds more wins to his resume, and another photograph is added to the collection inside the lady's drawer.
Surely this is only one among countless other possible interpretations. The plot may be also/mostly a contemplation on memory or cheating partners. But "Marienbad" contains, still, this layer of self-awareness, like the characters could almost sense there's a camera and a viewer somewhere: ghosts watching their eternal existence, they themselves fearful of being no more than ghosts, trying to escape the inevitable, and perversely making us see/remember that our existence is not really that different from theirs.
Nymphomaniac: Vol. II (2013)
He just couldn't resist, could he?
Lars Von Trier indeed would be pretentious, ridiculously desperate to 'épater la bourgeoisie', IF he was a realist. But he directs fables, he's like Jose Saramago with a camera - the symbolism always justifies what you'll see in, say, 'Antichrist'.
In 'Nymphomaniac vol. 2', Von Trier disqualifies this kind of reviewer's relief. The message is antiintelectualist, and in yet another seesaw of Nature vs. Culture the reason is left, with no hope or consolation, with the animal that recognizes itself as 'bad person' and paints humanity with one single predicate - hypocrisy. It's like Von Trier committing suicide and leaving a letter saying that, in the end, despite all those eloquent minutes, it was all just porn delivered to people hypocritically faking to want anything more or less than that.
I could say the first one is really good. Hell, vol.2 was alright up until the end. But Von Trier just couldn't resist himself. He makes Joe murder the semiotics and silence the hermeneuticists, the exegetes, the false Candids and Christs - there's no hope, only sick rapists with nice speeches. And then Joe runs away, and with her goes Von Trier, mocking those who stay, singing hate to say I told you so, now deal with it, look how unpredictable I am, don't you try to decipher me, I'm a genius, nobody catches me etc.
OK, then. Good job, Von Trier, now everyone knows you're completely in charge of your own movies. Until the very last seconds. Congrats.