[1.8]
What is appealing or rewarding about seeing this film? I got nothing out of this, save for a few chuckles and mild appreciation for the visual format (in which each scene is shot in a single, static shot, with one exception—at the railway station, in which the ghosts first appear, and the camera dollies back a few feet to follow the characters). Yet, Michael Haneke uses a similar, if more fluid style, where the action takes place almost entirely within frame, but his films are far more beautiful and memorable. Sure, there were some eccentric characters and darkly comic moments, but they were slapped together so blandly and without an apparent meaning. The finale hardly felt like any sort of climax, and I’m not sure at all what happened, or what it was supposed to mean. The main character finds out he’s lost money he invested in some scheme to sell crucifixes, so he tosses them into a rubbish heap, and is then confronted by an army of ghosts, led by a blindfolded girl who was sacrificed earlier in the movie for a birthday celebration in honor of a 100 year old Nazi-sympathizing ex-General. What kind of connection am I supposed to make of this mess? I don’t know, nor do I care. If the movie were funnier or stranger, perhaps I would be tempted to try to decipher the message that director Roy Andersson intends for the film. Instead, I will merely keep a few vague images in my memory (of the 100 year old man sitting senile in a baby crib; a naked wife in a loose nightgown; the ritual sacrifice of the young girl by hurling her off a cliff; the son who wrote too much poetry and went mad; the magician who accidentally cut his volunteer in the stomach; and, of course, the frightening pale white make-up that most of the actors wore). It astonishes me that this movie comes as highly praised as it does.
burning retina 