This is a very well made movie, but definitely NOT for everyone (like observant Catholics, for instance). It's like Luis Bunuel film, but with even more extreme imagery--for instance, where Bunuel simulated cutting open a woman's eyeball, in this film a woman actually DOES insert a cow's eyeball into her vagina (whatever THAT is supposed to symbolize). This movie may at times approach the arty sleaziness of Pier Paolo Passolini's notorious film "Salo", but I haven't personally seen that. Of the movies, I HAVE seen it reminded me of "Viva la Muerte" with its use of often grotesque animal imagery, and "The Highest of Skies" with it's combination of religious iconography and extreme scenes of sexual/bodily degradation.
The main character is one of those weird European Communist/modern artist types (Stalin, of course,being a great appreciator of modern art). He has a wife who is very much and very dangerously insane (she drinks out of the toilet and at one point tries to cut off the nipples of her nurse/maid), yet he leaves her untreated perhaps as part of some "art" project (there are shades here similar to Lars von Trier's more recent art-house outrage "Antichrist"). Meanwhile, there is some kind of religious festival taking place in the local town. The younger townspeople are using the occasion for a drunken, naked bacchanal the saints would probably not approve of. The virginal teenage boys are doing their damnedest to get in the panties of the virginal teenage girls. A lonely young butcher gets so turned on staring at the breasts and asses of the local girls that he has to go graphically hump a side of beef. A bunch of younger kids are wandering around engaging in street fights. A prepubescent boy meets a slightly older pubescent boy who has been injured in a street fight, and takes the injured youth to the villa of the artist and the insane woman. Eventually, we learn why it is NOT a good idea to perform analingus (look that up in a dictionary if you need to)on an insane woman while her weirdo artist husband watches (not that most people WOULD do that. . .)
This movie does get pretty outrageous, but it is well made and definitely worth seeing if you're not too easily offended. I'm not exactly sure the point of all this religious imagery, animal imagery, and general human debauchery and degradation, but it's definitely all presented in an interesting manner. And it's definitely not boring.
