A Decent Woman (2016)

Director: Lukas Valenta Rinner

Screenplay: Ana Godoy, Ariel Gurevich, Martín Shanly and Lukas Valenta Rinner

Cast: Iride Mockert as Belen, Ivanna Colona Olsen as Paola, Mariano Sayavedra as Garita, Pablo Seijo as Arquitecto, Martín Shanly as Juan Cruz, Andrea Strenitz as Diana

Synopsis: Belen (Iride Mockert), a housemaid for a rich suburbia family, peaks into a woodland area nearby cordoned off by an electric fence. A New Age nudist colony live there, and after her initial hesitation, she joins them finding herself at peace finally. As building pressure against them from the suburbanites grows however, the results when triggered to a breaking point become drastic.

Whatever my opinion of A Decent Woman, I will argue this film's style is more rewarding than the dirge of sub-realistic art cinema. It is a style clearly indebted to the likes of Yorgos Lanthimos and Ulrich Seidl, one that has become a style shared over films regardless of their country of origins, and as the "slow cinema" that became popular in the 2000s was it is becoming more common as a shared aesthetic style over multiple films. It is subjective at times and even pretentious to divide these styles when for the popular they may look entirely the same; but a factor, especially for the Lanthimos films, to help distinct them is that they rely on tableau shots with minimal camera movement and have a tendency for absurdity mixed with transgression. At least as a result you do not get the permanent close-ups fund in other films but with a work like A Decent Woman a sense of environment to build from with the numerous long shots, the camera never shaking and the sense of colour to the images presence even when they are still naturalistic. At least with these films there is a sense of the unpredictable at hand, far from simplistic nihilism but a style even when it has been bleak and cynical infused with surreal humour.

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Obviously now there are multiple films across countries and languages with this style, there is a danger of nameless copycats existing, where regardless of their origins there is no sense of distinction to raise themselves from the others imitating the likes of Lanthimos. A Decent Woman struggles against this whilst having moments of unique personality. It is helped by its setting, Argentinean woodland having a sense of being an actual paradise, appropriate for nudists to have their own Eden. It is to an advantage for the materialistic modern culture against the hippies. Rinner does simplify the suburbanites, merely some glimmers of their tensions surrounding the one family Belen works for, which does undercut how interesting the nudists are themselves. They are stereotypical themselves, a free love community who sit around in nude circles in the grass talking of various forms of spiritual energy or expressing their emotions honestly, but they are harmless to the outside world. Any community where you can see a vinyl copy of Lizard by King Crimson in someone's hut are not exactly corrupting influences on the suburban environment. Anything sexual is covered by an isolated environment, and with only the improvised pest control of parrots being a potential issue for their neighbours with the image of nudists with rifles. In fact their animal orgy in the centre of the story, painting themselves up as various animals of the wild with the cast acting as them, is the best part of the film as it feels idiosyncratic to this director. A scene with shots of the various cast members, of all shapes and ages, painted as animals which emphasises how the film goes beyond the immediate shock of the constant nudity to an actual oneness to these characters to the environment unclothed.  

The problem with A Decent Woman, when the suburbanites complain about the nudists minding their own business and an incident takes place that pushes people to the edge, is that it takes a simplistic turn. One with an ethical issue for a viewer as the hippies have been painted with a sympathetic brush before. For three quarters they are pacifists only to turn violent after an event which does not feel like a catalyst but a horrible accident. It is meant to be a metaphor for a cultural clash between these New Age or alternative lifestyles and an imposing, restrictive normalcy, but as you see nudists with guns clash on a golf course with armed police the message has been very simplistic beforehand, too simplistic. Also too sadistic in how it gleefully embraces the nude hippies getting bloodthirsty without the consequences and morbid humour of Yorgos Lanthimos. His characters, no matter how much they could act in despicable ways, are still compelling as complex figures. Here with A Decent Woman you see how more has to be done with such a style, the absurdity meant to mean more.

Abstract Spectrum: Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Personal Opinion:

Good moments are found in A Decent Woman, which show a lot of potential in Lukas Valenta Rinner as a director. He needs to find more of his own style however.  

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Pi (1998)

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Director: Darren Aronofsky

Screenplay: Darren Aronofsky

Cast: Sean Gullette as Maximillian "Max" Cohen; Mark Margolis as Sol Robeson; Ben Shenkman as Lenny Meyer; Samia Shoaib as Devi; Pamela Hart as Marcy Dawson; Stephen Pearlman as Rabbi Cohen; Ajay Naidu as Farrouhk; Kristyn Mae-Anne Lao as Jenna; Lauren Fox as Jenny Robeson

Synopsis: Whilst locked in his rented apartment working on how to predict stock market data, mathematical genius Maximillian Cohen (Sean Gullette) may have found the name of God in a code his computer prints out before dying on him. With a corporation at one end interested in his research, and a sect of rabbinical mystics at the other desiring the name of God, Cohen ignores the warnings of his mentor and friend Sol (Mark Margolis) of how dangerous his search for the truth is, as his cluster headaches increase and bizarre sights plague his waking reality.

Pi is the film even those who hate Darren Aronofsky's work should see. Nineteen years before mother! (2017), Pi is a drastically different film and its obvious way when you watch them close to each other. mother! is the product of hubris, unfocused and problematic, with money and production design behind it without stepping back to carefully consider itself. Pi like the best of the American independent films of its time, even if raw and imperfect, is ferocious and made by a hungry young filmmaker, helped by the restrictions he had to make the film. At only eighty minutes, there is no time for pretentiousness and Aronofsky cannot afford big name actors or CGI rock monsters. It is for the better.

Helping is that, whilst mother! presented a problematic misreading of Christian iconography and vague depictions of the creative ego and environmentalism, Pi feels like the creation of a Darren Aronofsky who has actually read up on his premise. It is still a surface interpretation of Jewish mysticism and mathematics, but it is a clearly presented premise, in which a young man fails to heed his mentor's warning of searching for the truth, said mentor even going as far as point out one of his goldfish is named Icarus, the figure of Greek legend who flew too close to the sun. Cohen himself has experience in this as, referenced numerous times in narration, he was once warned by his mother never to star directly into the sun only to do such a thing. That his mentor's stroke that debilitated him was likely due to also finding the name of God, through his own research on the number of Pi, is not enough to dissuaded Cohen. Aronofsky does not try to add any more themes too many, and he is not trying a subject like artistic creativity or the nature of mankind which could show him up as being empty minded on the topics. Instead this is something well worn and yet able to lead to his own unique take on the subject. That it references Jewish mysticism even if a beginner's guide to it, like the Kabala, is certainly a different way to tackle the subject as said mystics and a sinister corporation encroach on Cohen. A curious paranoia thriller, a Jorge Luis Borges plot in need of Borges having to actually interpret it in his own way.

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Here as well the body horror that failed in mother! works as it is the result of Aronofsky having to rely on limited means. It is also original as a result of this, where even the fact it evokes other work and even surrealistic art does not deny the film its own idiosyncratic mood with the material. Cohen's visions, hallucinations or an insight to another world, are far and away more frightening than in mother!, especially as the film in set in real life New York City of the period forcing these bizarre moments into our own world and Cohen's. Where a bleeding man is stood erect on a subway station platform or when Cohen finds a brain covered in ants, sights that could be found in an isolated urban environment if you crossed the wrong backstreet or went on the underground subway late at night. If there is a film Aronofsky has likely taken a lot of influence from it is Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), which he has admitted to. At times, especially in the look of the film and Coehn's apartment being swallowed up by computers, it is as if the film is going to turn into an American remake of Tetsuo. It even evokes a work that was released the same year in its homeland called Serial Experiments Lain (1998), a Japanese animated series where a computer can swallow up an entire room with tentacle like cables and vast unknown components like Cohen's in his apartment. Aronofsky's is just as strange especially when Cohen finds an unknown organising has been cultivating amongst the circuitry.

Shot in high contrast black and white, Aronofsky's film is stunning to look at. It is not beautiful in the conventional sense, in many a grainy dank back alley, but the result feels lived in and atmospheric. The music is also perfect, not only Clint Mansell in an earlier part of his career but cult electronic musicians like Autechre on the soundtrack. This music is of its era but it has not dated in the slightest, the beats and crackles of each piece elevating the moments of paranoia and fear with ease and without becoming overbearing. Compared to no score and just pure unfocused chaos in mother! and the comparison stands out greatly in favour of the older film. Pi is not perfect because it has to deal with loose threads eventually in its premise. It is not as streamlined as Tetsuo was, having to juggle paranoia thriller touches with the esoteric kabala content and sci-fi horror, something which it could have gone further with for a few extra minutes to make all sides gel fully. However at eighty minutes one accepts it having to play fast and loose with the material, better for it to have been unpredictable rather than expounding on the material in ways which make the likes of later films like Noah (2014) egregious, full of clichés and terrible attempts of worldly contemplation.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Mindbender/Psychotronic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Personal Opinion:

If the Darren Aronofsky that made Pi returns, then I might change my mind on a previous statement I made (see here). The Aronofsky of Pi is alien to the Aronofsky who came later, who had over indulged and disconnected himself from reality to the point it became morally problematic. Considering how mother! has been viewed, trashed as much as cheered, maybe the humbleness of shooting on real streets on a low budget again will purge his acquired flaws and find himself. If he made a film as good as Pi as a result, I would gladly apologise for some of my more disparaging remarks as it would be happier for him and film viewers if the version of him who made Pi came back wiser and as hungry to make good cult films again.

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mother! (2017)

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Screenplay: Darren Aronofsky

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence as mother; Javier Bardem as Him; Ed Harris as man; Michelle Pfeiffer as woman; Domhnall Gleeson as oldest son; Brian Gleeson as younger brother

[Full Spoilers Throughout]

I wrote, on my Letterboxd page, that I would never watch another Darren Aronofsky film. I will add two caveats now, and least I be viewed a hypocrite, this is why I rarely due snap judgements after viewing a film, as inevitably I Will think with more consideration about what I saw even if the original judgement call is the same. What I have to bear in mind is that 1) I might revisit The Wrestler (2008), his most grounded work. And 2), the man who made Pi (1998) is a very different figure than the one who made mother!. If the man who made Pi returns I might see his films again. As I wrote before, none of Aronofsky's work between is of interest for me - overrated, unsubtle, or with Noah (2014) a headache. I fully believe mother!, whose title immediately evokes a Jeeves and Wooster story that should have been written, is the artistic statement so misguided Aronofsky effectively shot himself in the head on-film. Ambition is usually to be admired, even failing, but this film's entire ethos in its style and message is from the start an entire moral failure. Those who despised mother! will be glad to know this is a shooting fish in a barrel scenario, where I pick up a rifle and join in. Those who liked mother! I apologise to immediately, as this review is going to get ugly quickly.

The P. G. Wodehouse reference is apt, as is Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel (1962) if the guests refused to leave rather than couldn't, a sitcom narrative where an egotistical writer (Javier Bardem) refuses to listen to his younger wife (Jennifer Lawrence) when he lets random strangers stay with them. It's a comedy premise written by some who however is using this idea to house Old and New Testament symbolism, which is where immediately the problems lie. The film is disconnected in its various themes which never fully connect, starting as a situational drama but becoming body horror, than psychological drama, than fully embracing the religious overtones just in the first hour. It is not fleshed together well - not able to connect the styles properly like the likes of Andrzej Zulawski could because there is both no risk, all that Aronofsky depicts onscreen a cliché, and no emotional connection that allows the subversion of genre and expectations to work.

The religious imagery in particular is in the centre of the work's clear lack of focus. I came into mother! knowing very well its plot structure is based on the Bible. That Bardem's author is God, Ed Harris as Adam, Michelle Pfeiffer as Eve, and their sons Cain and Abel making a cameo. Automatic problems arise in that their characters gel badly to their portrayal, as a story of a writer whose hubris willing sacrifices his wife's happiness contrasts in its presentation to a story of humanity and God from the beginning. The idea of a whole planet's Christian chronology being represented in one house not a bad idea but one failed because Aronofsky both skims over details and is also failing to actually tackle the Bible in a way that feels cohesive, coming off instead as a badly read interpretation. When Noah's flood is depicted by a leaking sink pipe, and it is not shot in a way that is delicately humorous, there is a misreading on hand before you get to the more problematic takes on religion that come. This does not even get into the idea that Jennifer Lawrence is meant to be Mother Nature, not an issue for myself to co-exist with the Christian deity but definitely an issue when said figure of Nature is such a wet, insignificant one.

The performances, barring Pfeiffer in a brief role, are terrible. The characters are walking symbols, at odds when characters have to be fully fleshed for the psychological horror at hand too. Lawrence is the worst as she has been forced to act like a walking board of wood, dressed and filmed in a way by her then-boyfriend Aronofsky which that is utterly embarrassing as a professional performer, a subservient housewife figure who is a very sexist depiction for any actress to play. It is also deeply incongruous to the film's environmental side as for a depiction of Mother Nature, completely alien to what Nature is both in perceived surroundings and spiritual. That there are only a few scenes actually showing the outside world, all CGI riddled splurge, and that the only form of strength shown close to the real power of the natural world is the sort of superpower from an X-Men movie.

The overall aesthetic of mother! is also some of the worst I've seen in a mainstream Hollywood film for a while, a new nadir in all the creative decisions I hate in current filmmaking. Turgid, lifeless colour palette of browns and greys like many films of the 2010s, lulling the viewer into a stupor. Gallingly people have referenced the likes of Hieronymus Bosch in references to this film's aesthetic to which they need a history lesson of Christian art. From the reds of Bosch's hell to the green Satan of Michael Pacher's The Devil holding up the book of Vices to St. Augustine, the Bible is a vast colourful spectrum in both its Hell as much as Heaven. There is not even a sense of actual space and environment to the house this story is set in, because the camera is usually close-up to Lawrence thus preventing the viewer establishing shots to take in this generic country home as a space to represent the Earth and its occupants. Neither was it a good idea to not use a score, a decision which instead saps tension from the images further.

When the film reaches full blown religion horror, it collapses completely. Surrealism is at one end, an important allegory at the other, and mother! misses both by a country mike. A home which has a heart in its walls but never defines said home as a character in itself, an organism with weight to it. A heart in the toilet is just a disconnected shock. The glowing yellow liquid Lawrence takes to calm herself is never something even as a surreal inclusion instead, practically fairy dust and urine for all the viewer knows. The subject of the egotistical writer clashes with this fully bizarre middle and final act is lost as a simplistic idea, the environmental message so painfully obvious it is a sketch show parody of an environmental allegory movies. The religious imagery, as the writer's fans start to become a religion surrounding him, is so heavy handed it is not passable critique for religion. In fact watching a film like this regardless of my own beliefs or even yours as a reader, its evidence to how utterly loathsome and eye rolling critiques of organised religion are in any medium now, feeling less like the necessary critiques of a century ago but the collective works of immature teenage nihilists. Immature people who are just trying to offend for the sake of their own egos, worst as it never feels like the work of people who have actually thought long and hard on their own beliefs, or bothered to even attempt to read any religious text beyond just Christian ones.

mother! skims over its religious material so much you actually end up with legitimately offensive moments, so broad not only the Christians have a right to be angry but even atheists should be as well, as the hellscape the house becomes is affectively the skeptic's version of a Evangelical hell house. Hell houses for the unknowledgeable are alternative Halloween haunted houses showing the sins that one has to repent for, unsubtle and offensive to outsiders in many cases for what they depict. mother! final act is a hell house just as liable to offend intelligent viewers, as amongst its thrill ride of mankind's worst acts you have a female sex slavery in one room, with stereotypical mobsters who speak in another language meant to evoke Eastern European gangsters, and in another genocide in which people have bags put on their heads and shot. All like the stereotypical image of a hell house without subtlety, and not even the context no matter how offensive they can be of the Evangelical ones. Somehow Aronofsky justifies for me a little why the term "Hollyweird" exists for liberal Hollywood, because his depiction of human beings as merely the fleas on Earth rather than capable of transcendence manages to even offend a spiritual agonist with liberal ideals like me.

Then you get to the baby. Considering it is clearly Jesus Christ, despite Lawrence being Mother Earth and clearly not the Virgin Mary, I did suspect Aronofsky would go as far as having a crucified baby on a cross and be that stupid. Somehow he managed worse. It is at first unintentionally hilarious as, perfectly described in the review on 366WeirdMovies.com, you see a "crowd surfing baby", one of the worst CGI creations I have seen on top of a crowd of extras like we have ended up at a Metallica concert. Then, after killing the child, said extras eat said baby's corpse. It is a moment that has been too much for many, and as someone who became an uncle for the first time in the year when mother! was unleashed into the world, my perception of child death in cinema is going to be complicated. That is not the reason why it sinks the film into the trash however. It is that this is clearly meant to represent the Eucharist when it does, when at the Last Supper Christ said to his followers his body was the bread and his blood the wine, the moment that the border between a critique in religion and full extreme belligerence against notions of human decency takes place. A moment of moral reprehensible behaviour in making a film, an argument that even transgression in art should always have a morality to it. Even Buñuel's more blaspermpus moments treated religion with complexity and was more vendictive on the likes of priests instead. This moment in mother! is when Aronofsky may have made one of the worst films I have seen in the 2010s even if technically competent.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Mindbender/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Personal Opinion:

A pretentious, miserable and utterly irredeemable failure. One of the more insulting films I have seen from the 2010s and I was even prepared for its more notorious aspects ahead of time. And the part that I fear will happen is that people will point to the film as a great canonical work of surrealism and transgressive art. No matter how elitist this may sound, I suspect that some of the people who do so could have not been bothered to watch a good film like Un Chien Andalou (1929) even if on YouTube, letting this failure on many levels have credit when Aronofsky should be barred from making more films like this unless he had a drastic revaluation of his ethics. If mother! somehow manages to develop a cult in the next twenty years, I could turn into an Armond White figure quicker than sooner due to the utter misguided celebration of this embarrassment.