Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by tinear (A) on September 22, 2010 at 10:28:18

available from Netflix on a download.
This is for Tarr fans, only. It's tensions, such as they are, are very subtle and the characters are less developed than his (un)usual creations. Still, for those who have the Tarrian patience, the film is a brilliant reinvention of the crime film, perhaps because it isn't really concerned with it, per se, but rather showing its effects and the place of crime itself in our Divine Comedy.
The detective is a magnificent creation and the fact that he is poorly lip-synched didn't perturb me in the least. The only weakness of the film is the presence of Tilda Swinton who "acted" as hard as she could and appeared amazingly misplaced in a Tarr film. If her lower lip wiggled just a tad harder during her emotiveness, I expect it could have flown off her face, stage left.
Tarr, not necessarily in content, is the visual brother of Kafka; the closest filmmaker to him, at least in mise en scene, would be Tarkovsky, though their content and meter are very different. Actually, you'd have to study Cocteau to arrive at a filmmaker who so alters a viewer's sense of time---- but Tarr isn't concerned with creating other worlds but rather in showing the strangeness of this one. "Slow down, shut up, look around you." That is what he does: the camera silently looks in on us, and what we are shown of ourselves is more frightening than any tawdry horror film.