Pros: Excellent camera-work, great sound, good use of high-speed cameras.
Cons: Plot, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Freudian psycho-babble, von Trier stroking his ego.
Plot summary: Through the death of his son, psychologist husband finds out that his neurotic wife suffers from a deeply rooted violent psychosis. Sadly, two things make this discovery an uncomfortable one:
1) He's alone with her in a forest cabin, far from civilization.
2) He's too PC to slap some sense into her.
Oh yeah, spoiler alert.
Now, there's alot of things in this movie to be annoyed about, even if you do enjoy pretentious, artsy high-brow drama.
-There's barrels of visually documented sex in the movie. I'd say half the movie is sex, but that might be because it's shot and presented in a very dominating way, and since story progression is lacking the sex-acts tend to take over. The representation of the act itself is an undecided mix between classical Hollywood jewmance and Feminist porn, which is the perfect mix to bug the living shit out of me.
-Gainsbourg's voice, and eventually her face and body made me cringe. Chiefly British accent that sounds unnatural and pretentious (although, it should be natural, her being born in London and all) droning on without any emotion for two long hours, as she visually detours into madness, made my head hurt. Then, having constant facial close-ups and a whopping ton of nude-shots, and I began to hate her physically as well. Maybe it was the part she played, but I rather think I saw through that and simply saw her as she was, the type of woman against which I'm instinctively biased.
-Von Trier constantly breaking the golden rules of film-making. It's fine for attention-grabbing once or twice, but come on. You need to have at least some consistency in the shots, otherwise it distracts the viewer from the event or conversation that's taking place. Keeping track of the timeline as characters and cameras are constantly switching places, characters talking out of turns, needless shots coming between events, necessery shots being left out -- why not just put everything together in a random order, eh? That'd be really artsy.
-You can tell straight away it's a movie intended to fellate film-students and really pretentious cunts. While they may have a field-day with this, I, in turn, have not. :sadche:
So, what do you guys think?
