mr.slut

Boy oh Boy, please Mr. Allen, retire!

This was the most painful experience to watch in the cinema of this year (2024) so far. Terrible acting from all three main actors, terrible sound design, unfitting music (yeah, yeah, we all know he loves Jazz, but you need to have a feeling when to use tunes like these. I like old jazz, but there are movies where Jazz simply doesn't work), very ugly cinematography and colour grading, very boring script and predictable ending. Every shot looks ugly. And really, really terrible dialogue. Not one redeeming quality in this.... The satire of the bourgeous living style fell flat on its face - simply not funny, not poignant, not clever at all. These 96 minutes felt like 3 hours.

Don't get me wrong, I am a keen fan of several of his older movies - these had wit and were genuinely funny - but this monstrocity of nothingness was likely the last film of his I'm gonny watch.

Shallow and rather uninteresting characters engage with other uninteresting, underdeveloped characters. Some of the actors employed are usually very good, Martina Gedeck, Charly Hübner, Peter Kurth, but they don't get to show their trade, due to really bad dialogue and story developments in their respective narrative. The film tries hard to evoke a sense of loneliness and depict lost characters, yet fails miserably in doing so, because the emotion is told, not felt. The camera finds some interesting scenes of the nightly Leipzig - as a mirror of the innermost feelings, but it sabotaged by the editing. The film wants to be melancholic, but hesitates to give the images the time they would need.

A truly bland film which aims high but falls short.

I like dark humor, I like biting satire. But I can't laugh at jokes about child-rape, forced prostitution or white slavery.

The premise of the movie was indeed intriguing - the ambivalence of how to cope with loss and how to find solice in other persons - even if they are complete strangers driven together by fate.

Yet the emotional side of the story is painfully superficial and never goes to places of deeper impact. All the violence committed seems not really to affect anybody on a deeper level in the film.

Without going deeper into the plot (in order not to spoil any surprises), there is no remorse of the violent action taken - there is no questioning the outcome - all happens rather randomly without psychological or legal consequences.

I read comparisons to the humor of the Coen Brothers - oh my! They (half of the time) deliver quite thoughtful humor - some of it light, some dark.

This film however always stays superficial and is very very shallow - plus - most annoyingly - very reactionary in its tone.

No sir, I didn't like it!.

Maybe my expections were too high?