The Stranger

If the fame of Camus' novel outstrips its quality, Visconti's film suffers from the converse. I think this film is virtually unavailable and it's a damn shame. I was lucky enough to catch a screening of a restored print and thank god none of the dialogue was dubbed in french.

This film is incredibly well shot and pulls off the remarkable feat of giving screentime to huge swaths of Camus' interior monologue. The voice over works incredibly well. Another strength is Anna Karina, she deserves more credit for this role. And a final strength is not overdoing the existentialist camera work. There's something elegant in Visconti's close-ups; consider the one of Meursault's steady hands as he flirts with smoking a cigarette beside his mother's coffin. The story is about a man's misrecognition by society; the film does an excellent job of portraying the subtle irritation this condition gives rise to.

The Antichrist

It's been several years since I've left a cinema and felt like stopping people on the street to apologize for something.

The last time this happened to me was after watching Pasolini's Salo, a film which convinced me that any kind of hunger or desire has a logical conclusion in extreme cruelty and even fascism. Lars von Trier is also really good at playing with logical extremes. The Antichrist explores two kinds of responses to the challenge of living in the aftermath of an inexpiable crime. The masculine response is rational, ordered, structured, and even cold. The feminine response is disordered, emotional, unstructured, and unpredictable. Both come up short.

The ensuing drama is terrifying, and the acting is convincing--so convincing in fact that it's easy to overlook the thin and annoying plot mechanism of the woman's failed PhD dissertation on medieval misogyny. It's the closest von Trier has ever come to extremely lazy screenwriting, but he can easily be forgiven on account of how much success he attains with his characters.

And I'm uncertain whether the ghoulish talking animals and other unsightly preternatural junk remain below von Trier or if he exalts these elements of schlock horror. Either way it is the disturbing treatment of human problems and our hastily drawn, totally inadequate solutions that makes this a great film.

The Box

At least Sartre's face wasn't made from crappy CGI.

After spending millions of dollars to create a 1970's NASA hanger, the producers of The Box must have decided that instead of making a movie, they wanted to make a dramatic instructional video for future generations of screenwriters. They should have called this film "How To Mangle Exposition," or "Philosophical Topics: Let's Abuse Them".

Surprise: the Creator (or 'the power responsible for lightning' in this film's mystical jargon) wants to test human fidelity to the categorical imperative. According to Kant, we're supposed to be hard-wired to universalize our maxims before acting morally; according to The Box it's somehow fair to 'test' people by making them desperate for money and then offering them cash with unobvious negative consequences. This makes no sense.

Another surprise: the depiction of 1970s wives as more morally vulnerable than their husbands, willing to 'push the button' for money and tear the roof down. Really? Does NOW have a film review council?

The only good thing to say about this film is that it's not the worst film about death, disease, free-will, the afterlife, and the non-specific divinity. That honor belongs to The Fountain.