Container

A disturbing but very intelligent and sensitive movie that dares to uncover the darkest thoughts and feelings of a human being, which are at the same time childish and innocent. Only recommended for people fearless enough to confront themselves. The most intimate film I have ever seen. Once again the director manages to address in a very original way the complexity of the human being, the desire for acceptance and the fear of being considered different. It shows how ambivalent our feelings are, how society has constructed a fixed idea of guilt with anything that is not considered normal by social standards when there is nothing more human than to dare to be oneself at the price of being misunderstood. Not recommended for simple minds.

To watch an avant-garde film is fraught with risk. At times one is rewarded with an imaginative masterpiece, other times one flinches at abominable failure. Alas, "Container" is of the latter kind.

An odd mixture of discordant grainy B&W images and an endless voice-over. Those two components rarely mesh. If feels like watching a muted film and listening to the soundtrack of another.

The imagery is a mixture of transvestism, bacchanals, mild S&M, fetishism, etc. It's not titillating. It is just there as a reminder of the human body as a flexible vehicle for expressing perversions.

The imagery did not bother me. The voice-over did. Spoken in the form of a supplicant whisper throughout, it is persistently irritating. And this before I comment on what is being said.

At first I thought this was a confessions-of-a-trans-gender, a long-winded whining about life's vicissitudes. Later it touches on a variety of subjects: Chernobyl, nihilist thoughts, suicidal musings, and religious drivel. Eventually it ceases to be an individualistic stream of consciousness and morphs into a rambling commentary about humans.

I stayed to the bitter end on account of the advertised promise by an admirer that the end would bring a twist. I felt angry to be duped. The last five minutes are as bad as the first five. Only the most die-hard avant-gardistes should waste their time with "Container".

it's like a sound piece over images of video performance. there's a self depreciating dramatic monologue pouring out abstract, pain-of-existence stuff and a rotund man and a pretty lady doing performance art. I love it, it is like a bible to me. I love him bearing her mass, I love her putting a doll in her boot. I saw this in an audience of three at Edinburgh Film Festival and one guy walked out. It is not a film for those who like traditional, normative narratives. I like David Lynch. Moodysson creates a psychological feeling in this film similar to some of the abstract monologues found throughout Lynch films or similar to Harmony Korine perhaps.

Lucas Moodysson is best known for his wry 2000 feature about Seventies Swedish communes, 'Together,' and the stark and heartbreaking 2002 depiction of a Russian girl exploited for prostitution, 'Lilya 4-Ever.' He's also made a film about a man shooting a porn movie in a shabby apartment while watched by his young son ('A Hole in My Heart,' 2004), a much-praised study of teenage girls ('Fucking Åmål'/'Show Me Love,' 1998; Ingmar Bergman called it "a young master's first masterpiece"), and a documentary ('Terrorists: The Kids They Sentenced,' 2003) about anti-globalization demonstrators at Gothenberg. This may give some idea of his orientation, which is very political and takes on a variety of social issues.

'Container' is a venture--not a very accomplished one--into the avant-garde. With a continual murmured voice-over by the young American actress Jena Malone (who at one point identifies herself and says she's never been to Sweden before), in grainy black and white, the film seems mostly to depict a young overweight man who's a cross-dresser, though it's hinted at one point that the man "playing" this role is nothing of the kind. This person, sometimes in dress and wig, plays with clippings and all kinds of only half-identifiable junk, rolls around on the floor, and, in the voice-over, which is not particularly coordinated with any on screen action, describes himself as continually fantasizing about being a celebrity, about being in contact with tabloid film stars like the Spice Girls and the porn queen Savannah. Sometimes these references are funny, and they give the otherwise often mournful or deranged chatter a cozier note. Sometimes he/she also refers to Jesus and pregnancy and virgin birth. Gradually a sense is conveyed that this person is a metaphor, though mixed with other things, for a twentieth-century media-overloaded public. He's fat because he's a "container" for all the detritus of corporate over-production, the junk of life that can never be disposed because there's nowhere left for it to go. The "consumer" consumes all, and becomes puffed up with garbage. We are the detritus of our collective consumer lives.

Another description of the film reminds one that the protagonist "carries an Asian woman, piggyback, through a garbage-filled landscape." There are also sequences that seem to be in a hospital, wandering from corridor to corridor; and still others in a trashy abandoned house with peeling walls and debris everywhere. The film was shot in Chernobyl, Transylvania and in Sweden's Film i Väst studios in Trollhättan.

While obviously Moodysson has been capable of warm humanism, this is more an effort at thumbing his nose at the audience, and follows upon A Hole in My Heart, which has been described as nauseating. Clocking in at around 75 minutes, 'Container' is so uninteresting and repetitious that it seems much longer, and only sheer masochism and an overriding sense of duty kept me from walking out before it was over. Films of this kind are never easy to watch, because they don't have a "hook" of character, chronology, or visual touchstones to keep one watching. One might add that a barely mumbling, depressed-sounding young woman's voice is not much of an addition to the cinematic effect. Compare things like 'Koyanasqaatsi,' which while meandering and repetitious and lacking in narrative content, engages with visual beauty and hypnotic music. Obviously Moodysson eschews the slickness of such work; and why not? But, though surreal and rife with mysterious and strange goings on, 'Container' lacks the visual originality and interest of similarly avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakage or Kenneth Anger. 'Container' ultimately is very clearly better to talk about than to watch. Where Moodysson's career is going now is hard to say. One reviewer, perhaps appropriately self-styled as "Movie Martyr: Suffering for your cinema," describes this as the next step in Moodysson's "spectacular career immolation following his first few features" and concludes that "those who still might be willing to give the director the benefit of doubt, and especially those who appreciated 'A Hole in My Heart,' should be encouraged to seek out 'Container.'" Yes, and others can rely on second-hand accounts.

Shown as part of the Film Comment Selects series at Lincoln Center, New York, February 26, 2008.

Writer/director Lukas Moodysson's 2006 Swedish film is an experimental work vaguely akin to the avant-garde and underground films of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, shot in black and white, and utilising a fast camera and rapid montages. In a 'container' a 'conflicted' personality ruminates on a world full of other 'containers', 'labels', and 'traps'. In this juxtaposition of sound and imagery Peter Lorentzon (as a gender 'confused' patient in a mental institute?) and his nurse? (Mariha Aberg) indulge in seemingly absurdist train of thought, stream of consciousness ramblings. These include gender, war, Chernobyl, celebrity, identity, body image, madness, religion, objects of consumerism, addiction, obsession, the porn star Savannah, depression, gayness, superheroes, a lack of love, mortality, and mental angst. There's something symbolic (container as metaphor for human mind?) and possibly schizophrenic going on here (the two people as facets of the same person?), and we also have a dose of egotism, neurosis, sadism and melancholia, as well as the constantly asked (and universal) question 'why?'.