Carnages

"Carnages" is a very weird and bizarre movie, taking place in Spain, Belgium and France and with the stories linked through meat, bones, eyes and horns of a bull killed in a bullfight. Most of the stories are intriguing, sometimes funny and even surreal, with very odd characters; although original, the whole is irregular. The cast has good performances, and this overrated film was awarded with five prizes, plus three nominations in some festivals. The cover of the Brazilian VHS indicates that this movie won also the Best Film in the FICBrasília 2003, which is not listed in IMDb. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Estranhas Ligações" ("Weird Connections")

So far the posted comments are mostly negative and appear to take the stance that the six degrees of separation syndrome is bull. I enjoyed it. Sue me already. Okay, it was the name Jacques Gamblin that 'sold' me. He's a solid, reliable actor who I've never seen give a bad performance whilst I HAVE seen him give some doozys. About a year ago he shared a screen with Clovis Cornillac in A Small Week and they're both here again except they never have a scene together. I was also interested in whether or not Lio could act - previously I'd seen her only in concert singing Prevert (not all that well, if anybody asks you, but then she did have to follow Montand). If as a film maker you are interested in telling the stories of several disparate characters there are worse ways to do it than to connect them via a dead bull. Okay, most of the characters are straight from Central Casting Weird but they do perform well and entertain. As a debut I'd say this was pretty impressive. 8/10

CARNAGE is a stunning film - though from the outset it should be made clear that it is not a film for all audiences. For those who cringe at gore, those who are frustrated by nonlinear storyline, and those who feel uncomfortable with magical realism - beware. This is a two-hour plus journey that demands concentration and suspension of belief to glean all of the multi-layered meanings it holds.

Stylishly opening with the elegant dressing and preparation of a handsome young bullfighter discussing his incipient time in the ring with his father, the film moves into a the bull ring in Spain and while the young bullfighter is gored, a young girl watches in horror on a television in France. Thus the sequence of coincidences begins. The dead bull is dragged from the ring, butchered, and his various parts (meat to restaurants, horns to a taxidermist, testicles, eyes, etc) are sent to unrelated places in Spain, Belgium and France. Along the way we meet the child who observed the goring on television and discover she is epileptic and draws pictures where dogs are larger than humans (because her's is!), an actress searching for her center, a therapy group bonding and yielding primal screams while nude in a pool, a taxidermist who lives with his mother (the wondrous Esther Gorintin of 'Since Otar Left') and his estranged anatomist brother married to a woman pregnant with quintuplets (neither brother speaks to their damaged father), and so many more. Each of these characters encounters one form or other of the dead bull as food, souvenirs, gifts, etc: each time the consequences of these coincidences add greatly to the story.

Meanwhile our gored bullfighter lies in coma in need of a liver transplant and it is one of the various women touched by the bull's demise in some way that dies in an accident and becomes the saving liver donor to the young bullfighter. The manner in which all of these myriad coincidental effects of the original bullfight mesh (altered relationships, rejoined parent/child schisms, deaths, altered lives) are sewn tightly together by the end of this apparent conundrum of a story.

The cast is uniformly exceptional. The camera work and pacing are mesmerizing, making the willing eye of the viewer see far more than previously thought possible. Writer/Director Delphine Gleize is truly a talent to closely observe. The audience for this artwork may not be large, but for those souls seeking unique films this one is Highly Recommended. Grady Harp

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

CARNAGE is a bad film made by an untalented director. Still some people strongly liked this film. It was very controversial when shown in Cannes.

Viewers either loved it or hated it. I hated it.

Carnages begins with a toreador getting dressed (etc.). Instant Chekhov- if you show a toreador getting dressed then you will see him, sooner or later, getting gored and carried out of the arena feet first. This time it was very much sooner.

Different story- a schoolteacher in Lille is worried because one of her students, a 5 year old girl, draws pictures in which the animals are bigger than the people. Teacher flies off to be with her parents in Spain. The little girl is subject to epileptic seizures and lives with a giant Great Dane. She is watching a bull fight on television when she sees the toreador being gored and carried out of the ring. The teacher arrives and is met at the airport by her mother who drives her home, partially following the truck bearing the bull's carcass.

The bull is cut up with the eyes going to a hospital researcher in Brussels. He finds that the bull was blind in one eye and brings the eyes home with him. His wife is very pregnant.

An Italian actress who has been been auditioning and working at small jobs in Lille attends sensitivity classes which take place in the nude in a municipal swimming pool featuring people you wouldn't want to see naked except the actress, who is played by Chiaria Mastroianni, who, having been born really, really rich, doesn't have to show her breasts in movies. She gets a job, in costume, at the local hypermarche selling meat from Spain. She sells a huge bone marked Romeo (the name of the recently deceased bull) to the family with the epileptic daughter and the Great Dane. While loading their car their shopping cart goes astray and hits the actress's wreck of a car. This is witnessed by a suicidal ice skater/philosopher who waits until the actress comes out of the shop to tell her he saw who did it. He knows their name and address from a bottle of Valium left at the scene.

The actress and the ice skater confront the family just as they give the bone to the dog which goes into immediate convulsions and dies. Meanwhile the researcher with the pregnant wife for some reason agrees to look after a neighbors bratty kid. Soon he is in the fridge playing with the bulls eyes. The researcher catches him at it and retrieves one from under the sofa where it has rolled. There he finds his wife's ultra sound which he discovers has five fetuses visible. (This is actually getting tiring just to recount.)

There is also a taxidermist (!) who lives closely with his retarded mother (!!) in a trailer. Really they are even closer than the limited space of the trailer would normally allow. She gives him a pair of bull horns (Romeo again) for his birthday which he loves. They go around selling his handiwork beside the road and at flea markets. A deaf mute man wants to buy the horns but he promised his mother that he won't sell them. Eventually, using information given him by his mother, he determines that the deaf mute must be his father. He goes to see the old man and accidentally gores himself while hugging his father. He returns home to find his mother dead and rabbits and white doves streaming out of the trailer.

Meanwhile the teacher has returned from Spain with her mother and they go out to a restaurant where the mother is served a dish made from the bull (Toro in red wine sauce) that should have gone to another patron. The other man comes over to the table and discovers that he once knew the mother but calls her by a different name. She tells him he is mistaken. The women leave the restaurant where she suddenly steps in front of a van and is struck and killed. She is taken to a hospital where her liver is donated to the dying matador. The father comes to the hospital and tells his daughter that her mother did go by another name but changed it after murdering her best friend/female lover. The researcher's wife has to be carried out of their walk up apartment by pizza delivery guys and has five babies in the hospital. The actress and the ice skater attend nude sensitivity classes classes together and work up an ice skating act. The matador gets the liver and survives and his nurse has a baby in her womb which already likes him. I forgot what happens next. If this is your idea of a movie then be my guest. Instead of mentioning how it was done, how it was played, how it was shot, I'll just leave the plot lying around here because it expresses completely what's wrong with this film. Some people might read this and think 'that sounds interesting' and go see the film. Go in good health I say. Mind you though, it's quintuplets. Five. An overbearing retarded mother and a deaf mute father. A liver transplant and a murderous lesbian secret past. Fat naked people in a swimming pool doing sensitivity exercises while a snooty actress plays coy. A dead Great Dane. An epileptic five year old. And five babies. Some people loved it. It won awards.

"Carnage" is a foreign contribution to the many recent films which explore the lives of people with some interconnectedness. In "It's the Rage" the common denominator was the hand gun. In "Magnolia", it was a game show. In "Five Senses", it was a human sense. In "Carnage", it's part of a bull. Killed in a bullfight, a 1000 pound beast makes it's way to a rendering plant where it's dissected. A handful of characters in the film eventually acquire part of the bull while we voyeuristically watch their plebeian lives as they trudge from day to day and, we're supposed to believe, are affected by the bull. Well, this flick is just so much bull and, in spite of some positive critical commentary, just doesn't work. The film is a solid production which bombs on it's ridiculous story making for a slick but boring watch which seems to be building but in the end just fizzles. With subtitles and a 2 hour duration, "Carnage" isn't worth the time or effort. (C+)