Great post. Thanks for bringing so much of the film back to me. I love that term, ‘primal hope’.
I’m so happy this thread keeps burbling back up.
-xtien
I found the comparisons to the Spanish film “El Orfanato”, or “The Orphanage” pretty striking, especially since Belén Rueda bears such a striking similarity to Emmanuelle Béart. Here’s the qt3 thread.
Weirdy weird and French Deliverance are right. Boy howdy. I think there’s about an hour’s worth of good movie in there–the early pacing calls to mind what I liked so much about Wolf Creek for instance–with the rest making me go “huh?” Why didn’t you warn me about this?
Oh. You did. In the second post of this thread. Oops. For some reason when Netflix recommended it I totally forgot that. Which is doubly annoying because during the piano scene I thought, “He’s trying to make Deliverance.” I was quite pleased with myself, until I found the above quote. Rats. I am interested in talking about this film though, in relation to another movie I cannot talk about in this particular thread.
-xtien
“It’s good. It’s tender.”
Ha ha, Dingus watched Calvaire.
-TomWhy didn’t you warn me about this?
If it’s any consolation, projecting from my own experience: in a couple years the only thing you’ll really remember about it is the building weird tension in the first bit, a final bit that my memory has listed as eight hours of stumbling around a fog shrouded field (that timestamp may not be accurate), and a jumbled section in between that I think is the memory equivalent of the Atari 2600 graphical glitch they exploited to make the static field in Yars Revenge, only it’s made of question marks.
So I cleverly watched this with my wife and my mother, and while I didn’t particularly like it, I think it’s mainly an issue of pacing. Considering where it’s going it takes an awful long way to get there, and that way is littered with meaningless encounters.
Crypt’s point about the father having literally let him go helped. That hadn’t occurred to me on account of her describing how she had let him dress himself to go out made it sound like he went on his own, but merely without her makes more sense given his age.
By far, the worst scene was that drunkenness-to-uncomfortably-blurring-consent-lines sex, where the sudden glimpse of the pilot looking on was probably the least disturbing thing going on. Ultimately, after that point (and the local child vendor’s line about “what’s the difference”) I was psychologically numb to the movie’s later moments, and it made things difficult in terms of feeling any sort of weight to the consequences that unfold.
I’m not sure if the ending would register as sexually exploitative so much as just the kind of shortcut that I’d hoped would be avoided given how carefully they’d focused on details throughout.
Not a total wash, but as Rock8 said I wouldn’t recommend it to almost anyone.
One other individual moment: that scene where she realizes it’s a tooth that’s been thrown at her was striking, and not just because they come up through the movie as sort of a basic distinction between products of the developed and undeveloped world. It took me back to my original “oral discomfort with respect to civilization” moment, in EB Sledge’s “With the old breed” (a nonfiction WWII Pacific autobiography), where he catches himself stealing gold teeth from Japanese casualties and has a moment of clarity about how he’s slipping away.
what did your wife & mother say about the movie?
They both found it initially intriguing but overall a waste of time. They enjoy subtle horror and psychological suspense, especially if you can frame it in an interesting setting, but the pacing just destroyed any goodwill that the opening generated.
Which encounters did you find particularly meaningless? It’s been a while since I saw this, but I remember thinking the pacing was spot on in terms of working that Heart of Darkness angle of encounters that accentuate the different processes at work.
Well, there was a great economy of story when the movie is taking you through their loss, the encounter with the man who leads them out there, and Thaksin Gao. Even with the first adoption encounter, I was on board. But in particular the initial scene with the toothless old people and the feral children highlights where the movie left me behind, because rather than being a heart of darkness reference it seemed more in the vein of the “oh aren’t creepy children creepy when they are simultaneously innocent and malevolent” thing that J-horror and, to a less significant extent, Hostel’s gypsy children. I understand that the bridge for some is directly from Deliverance, but honestly I look back at films like that and I see some pretty sophisticated performances in what the children are up to compared to these sorts of one-dimensional shock stunts.
Once the movie decided it was going to go directly from psychological/cultural horror to more traditional stupid people doing stupid things in the face of a threat only idiots would find insurmountable, then it was natural that the ending would be a self-indulgent exclamation point to that thought process rather than the more subtle directions suggested in the first half.
In reference to Tom Chick’s posts:
There’s no proof that she’s mad at all. Her entire character is consistent with her growing belief that her husband subconsciously abandoned their child to die. The movie is about her increasing certainty of that very fact, culminating in a logical conclusion.
As the movie progresses she gets more and more desperate - not out of fear that her child might truly be lost to her but out of exasperation at her husband’s lack of emotional progress.
At the end of the movie she confronts him with the truth and he once again accepts no responsibility, and she then happily watches him die.
She tries to help him along with the “blank faced child” and the accepting of another child as her own, but he prefers the narrative of “mad woman” over that of “I abandoned my child”.
At issue for her is whether or not she will have another child with him. If he asks forgiveness for what he did she can accept him back. In a telling scene, she coldly lies there while he fucks her - sex without forgiveness. Very close to rape.
The earth imagery in the movie relates to having a child.
The closing scene of the film is her cleansing - cleansing her of her husband and readying her for childbearing with another man.
The moral decay of the husband who’s unwilling to accept his guilt is indicated by his closeness with the corrupt swindler as his drinking buddy as well as his flirtation with another woman.
It’s not cleanliness that’s sexy - earth is life. We plant our seeds in dirt.
The children at the end of the movie imitate the drowned child - muddy bodies, pale bloodless faces. They are the man’s guilt made manifest.
The intestines of the dying man fan out as a metaphor for the drowning child’s hair at the beginning of the movie.