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.

This must in fact be the only movie I've ever reviewed here on IMDb, that truly deserves the 1/10 vote.

Sure, it's feelbad, but feelbads at least have a purpose, a deeper meaning. This movie's only purpose is to make the audience feel bad. There is no deeper meaning to look for, like Moodyson's earlier flick "A hole in my heart" or Trier's "Dancer in The Dark".

Many in the audience left during the show, but I stayed, convinced on that the movie would eventually unravel something. Something to justify the bad poetry and disturbing hollistic images. But no. There was nothing to find. And I hate Moodysson for wasting my worst 70 minutes of my life for nothing.

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?'.

Controversial, daring, explicit, here's yet another Modysson's masterpiece. Why? because he is a master of what's he's doing, and it's prominent, to my mind, in all of his works. If you find the field of psyc(e)/hiatry appealing - you must watch this film. prying into the darkest corners of the human psyche, with a compelling artistic approach, he makes the viewers observe and experience a most troubled individual. "a woman in a man's body, a man in a woman's body. Jesus in Mary's stomach. The water breaks. It floods into me. I can't close the lid. My heart is full". It's just a pinch of the debris that the protagonist's mind contains. the executive aspects of this movie are carried out with simply great cinematic skill.

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".