Chained

This "Chained" is very well realized: you FEEL everything, you are there, spying the life of this man which is behaving in the most wrong ways you could imagine, without any help to recover.

So it is like a "documentary", perfect in its representation and in transmission of the tragedy, but... I think that stories, and so movies too, should be better than life: they should give audience some directions to become better people, making see how a character could change his behaviour, his ideas, in order to quit despotism, machism, cruelty and egotism, reaching some empathy with all beloved significant others, wife and step-daughter.

Here we follow the tragical crumbling of the life of a policeman, which is obviously wrongdoing at many levels, professional, personal and sentimental... and nobody helps him.

So I think that this total despair is strongly wrong in a work of art.

If I understand correctly from IMDB, this film ends the plot of a trilogy but was the middle film in order of release. I haven't seen the other two, but I think Chained stands perfectly well on its own-- except maybe an epilogue, a few seconds long, that I guess refers back to film no. 1.

The protagonist is a tragic figure. He's a man who thinks fast and brooks no nonsense, which makes him good at his job-- he's a policeman-- but brings him into constant conflict with a world that's swarming with too much nonsense for one man to handle.

Much of the film has a documentary feel. The lead actors, although they carry the movie as well as any glamorous star could, do not have the charming looks that we audiences are accustomed to. The camera dogs them in intrusive close-up, and as the actors speak their dialogue they do not make a point of conveniently speaking in turn but often overlap.

It's a movie that has more pity and terror in it than laughs and warmth. I don't predict great commercial success, but it's won a number of awards and I certainly wouldn't call them undeserved.