gilcostello

The film seeks to coalesce three totally convincing points of view on the possible origin of a man's death, a death that becomes more mysterious the more one looks at all the puzzling circumstantial pieces surrounding it, where, after a first all-inclusive glance, the conclusion seems obvious.

Anyone watching this film has a license to take it anywhere you want, and it could be a right or wrong interpretation, and it won't matter, for it comes down to a film portraying the many dimensions to a mysterious legal notion, "mitigating circumstances", what this film explores in depth, more than any film I've seen.

For me, after an experience at 11 years old, when my mom left our vicious dad, I could have gone with her, but I had certainty of her love, and none for my dad. So I chose to stay and take care of him, to win his love, to get proof of his love, what turned out to be a bad decision. He just got more brutal, almost killing me three times.

That's where I entered the film, inside a child's desperation to be loved at all costs, a child with a Dostoevskian sensibility who thinks in ways no adult would ever be able to discern, what makes for an interesting child with an interesting plan.

I will not go into the details of the narrative in this masterwork. Instead I'll list themes that came to mind while watching it, not necessarily intended by the director, for one can in this film travel to the end of any human universe in any direction, what I sense is a radical conclusion to this Age of Self Actualization that cost us our true identities in adopting transient, surface, need-fulfilling identities, contributing to the total disintegration of Western Civilization before our very eyes.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead over a hundred years ago became obsessed with finding what is true of every culture since the foundation of human consciousness, long before religion and politics took over defining existence for us. And the first universal she discovered, in both the most advanced and the most primitive cultures, was the concept of Karma, which means it is intrinsic to human existence, not instilled by surface cultural norms. This means, of course, that no one gets away--ever. But how do we visualize this horrid phenomenon in a visual-audio narrative display?

We are reminded of this gnawing, innate Karmic condition constantly by such catch phrases as "Instant Karma's going to get you", "What goes around, comes around" and "What you sow you'll reap". But how does an artist portray this horrid understanding?

Nathaniel Hawthorne, together with Edgar Allen Poe, introduced to American culture the genre of existential horror related to guilt, sin, evil, retribution and, finally, confession of those sins hidden in the dark for a lifetime of rabid self-actualization. It would be nice if a director would provide all these themes simultaneously that are festering inside this paradigm of meaning right up to its horrid finale, the individual confession that seeps into consciousness and opens us up to a collective confession of what we have been since the foundations of the world.

And then there is Flannery O'Connor who gave us in a short-story masterwork, "A Good Man is Hard to Find", the most explicit narrative engaging us in a grandmother facing in singular, absolute focus the Angel of Death, which inspired a friend of the killer named The Misfit to compliment the old woman after her death for being so lucid, thoughtful and philosophical in the moments leading to her sure death. And the Misfit responds, "She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

A half century ago, during a time I was investigating the darkest realms of the human soul, after exiting a ride at Disneyland called "It's A Small World After All", I wrote a lengthy essay titled "It's a Sadomasochistic World After All". My sense was the Thanatos Syndrome was now culturally on par with the Eros Syndrome, and it was becoming impossible to sense which would win out during this postmodern age, a cultural hell of radical self-absorption (a social epidemic of solipsism) of our own creation throughout the West. But after the deconstruction (disintegration) is complete, will it finally rid us of the Thanatos Syndrome?

Joseph Losey established himself as a gifted filmmaker in the late '40s with The Boy with Green Hair, my favorite film from childhood. The thing about genuine artists is they can't kick the truth. Regardless how wayward they become in their obsessive lifestyles or imaginations, their deepest obsession remains with the truth. Losey would eventually make in the early '60s what was up to that point the best film exploration of the sado-masochistic impulse, The Servant, with the great film actor, Dirk Bogarde, and during that same period the effects of child sacrifice in The Damned. He would later explore the very dark dead-end of multiple sexual partners as a way of life in his film adaptation of Mozart's Don Giovanni (1979). But his great masterpiece, in my view, is his penultimate film, La Truite (The Trout, 1985). He must have experienced great satisfaction in knowing that every critic missed the central theme and all the deeper nuances of what he was conveying in the film, most thinking that it was simply a comic film about a cold-hearted bitch, played perfectly by the ever-surprising Isabelle Huppert. I will not dwell on the complexity of what this film is about, only to mention that it involves a precocious child, Frederique, who discovers much too early in life the sado-masochistic matrix of the world and begins her trek on finding ways to adapt to it while not allowing a core innocence to be destroyed by it, to keep an upper-hand in distance, a postmodern Fanny Price who is elevated not by dominance but by a detachment that, in its severance from God, borders on being the ultimate act of cruelty, indifference. She keeps in tow a hyper-sensitive, self-destructive husband who is gay and who, in discovering the dead-ends of sado-masochistic delight, is devastated every second of every moment by looking long and hard into the reality of love lost in the only territory he knows, the valley of the void where he commits to drinking himself to death. The heroine played by Ms. Huppert has only one ally, an elderly Japanese man who has achieved a similar detachment in his life, and they become spiritual friends. This film is not about a bitch, but about "misdirected transcendency" (Girard) in a world that is severed from God.