This underground experiment called "Sacred Family" is a total mess from the get-go. It's so bad that it's not even worth mentioning its sequences
or anything, as it didn't have anything worthy about them. I understand the idea used for it, as director Sylvio Lanna tries to mimick the cinema of Godard
where images and sounds move on different directions and notions and its up to viewers to find a connection between different ideas. What you see is completely
different than what you hear, and in this particular case there are two opposite stories, one told through its images and one told with its soundtrack. But
nothing works. With Godard and similar, the ideas work (sometimes) because it's not used on everything, it's just portions of the film where he can play
with different medias that can make a unusual or relevant combination, there are things to be said and expressed in an apparently disoriented manner. Here,
everything was disjointed, painful to hear and slightly interesting to see, and it goes on for an eternity (one hour long that feels like forever).
It's indicated that it tells the story of a middle-class family getting detached from their values and everything, leaving it all behind (the visuals)
while an underground artist of sorts make a performance (the sounds). Both ideas are unappealing, weird looking (but the late 1960's settings and view of
the period are somewhat worth watching) and ugly sounding with its series of interrupted music, neighboring sounds, small lines of dialogues and phrases
here and there. It's not poetry in motion, it's all a pretentious collage of elements that doesn't form a whole. It's extremely revolting as one cannot form
a whole idea of what this was all about, not a single point was made and neither its mindless moments were entertaining.
And I'm forced to use old-style cliches such as "It's better to watch paint dry", "Hours of my life wasted where I could've been watching something
better or revisting a film I like", and "Hours of my life I won't have it back" (and I stayed til the very end). They're all true and valid, but I was also curious in seeing how such idea
could be presented on a feature film rather than a short, where it's best served. But after seeing the tragedy of it all, it's no wonder why Mr. Lanna
never returned to the feature format and his next project would only be made nearly 50 years after this very weird movie. One simply does not recover
easily after watching such a wreck. 1/10.
