Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Exentridermia
I've been on a quest to find movies which can leave me feeling violated, disturbed, and/or depressed. I realized it had been a while since anything impacted me that way. The last movie I had seen which left me feeling as if I'd been touched inappropriately was Ken Park, and that was four years ago.
In April, I discovered Taxidermia, a Hungarian delight. It chronicles three generations of men with bizarre obsessions. The grandfather is an orderly with a potent sexual imagination and a rich fantasy life which pours into his reality. The son is a competitive eater who works on setting various records and creating new gorging techniques. His emaciated son, is a taxidermist with a perverse interest in preservation.
The film manages to immerse the viewer in ugliness, absurdity, surrealism, and humour as black as blood from a cancerous bowel movement. It features a man ejaculating fire, a sex scene between that man and an overweight woman, a gorging contest followed by profuse vomiting, taxidermy, and a graphic operation. It never relents in hurling the ugliness at the camera. Yet, the gross-out gags are on a different level from the juvenile and artless films like Freddy Got Fingered . It's all shot with a great visual sense, and has some stunning as well as shocking shots. It also has a very bold and striking look to it. Taxidermia makes ugliness its business, and covers the "curse" passed down through the three generations of men, and their horrible outcomes in three segments with surrealism, and a Grimm sense of glee. It's hard to explain how it made me feel, or what it's like. It falls somewhere between the surrealist sketches of The Kids in The Hall, David Lynch, and David Cronenberg.
This weekend, I found the Belgian gut-wrencher Ex Drummer. It has to be the ugliest movie I've ever seen, and I mean that in a good way! It never stops to accommodate anyone. Early in the movie, the protagonist/villain, an author named Dries (who to my understanding is a doppelganger of the author of the novel the film is based on), says, "I want to step outside my happy world. Descend into the depths of stupidity, ugliness, obtuseness, unfaithfulness... Latch onto the lives of losers but without belonging to that world and in the knowledge that I can return to my own world." That's exactly where I am, personally, though I have already been there and done that in the past. I've seen ugliness, and latched onto the lives of losers. It gets tiring and annoying after a while.
It follows Dries meeting a band of three handicapped punks. There's Koen, a skinhead with a lisp who for some reason walks around on the ceiling of his apartment, and spends his spare time beating and raping women. Another is Jan, a homosexual with a stiff arm. His arm became stiff after a surreal masturbation mishap. The third handicapped band member is Ivan, a deaf heroine addict who beats his wife and neglects his child. There are other bizarre characters such as Big Dick, who... well, I'll leave that to the imagination.
From beginning to end, this movie grabbed me by the back of the neck and rubbed my face in human ugliness for its entire duration. The characters are all reprehensible. They revel in immorality, harbour views of racism and homophobia, and do every vile thing to each other that you could think of, rape, sex with mothers, beating, cussing each other out, killing. There's not a single character to like, though I personally relate to the author Dries in some ways. He's much more of an asshole, though.
The way the film is shot, it looks as if the director Koen Mortier wiped his ass and strapped the tissue over the camera lens. It has a very murky and gritty look throughout.
It's a polarizing movie. Some of the most noteworthy works are. Mortier didn't just refuse to make love to the world, it seems like he decided to try violate as many people as he could. I was left in stitches from how hard I laughed, but also with a pretty bad taste in my mouth. A bad taste in a good way. I didn't wash it out. Instead, I want seconds. And now I seek out another movie to slap me silly and call my great grandmother a whore.
See everyone in hell!
