Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by dave c (A) on August 06, 2006 at 22:40:09

This is in the style of Greenaway's work for the last decade at least, having images overlaid and the screen often having multiple images sometimes communicating sometimes different views of the same thing. The soundtrack voices come from all around you and whilst several narrators tell what pretends to be a continuous story, there is no actual narrative, but instead a multiplicity of views and opinions of the "life" in question.
At the heart of the film is (and this is just my opinion) a critique of both totalitarianism from the National Socialists (Nazis) and Stalinists to today with an odd parallel involving the Mormons and the bland grinding down inherent in modern globalised life.
Almost Kafka with more powerful drugs.
If you don't "get" Greenaway then this may just seem a pile of pretentious crap, but, and I know no better way of describing it, if you let it wash over (and probably under and to both sides) then you absorb the film almost through osmosis.
Visually the film is a treat although I find the cut up screen looks a little old by modern standards and layers of "reality" are added and subtracted right to the very end.
It curiously references a number of Greenaway's earlier films in both name and content, but I don't want to give any clues away before anyone brave... or foolhardy enough, goes to see it.