Landmark even if not perfect film

Rating: 8/10 (16 September 2012)

Justly regarded as a landmark film, this disturbing and violent movie by Stanley Kubrick – stunningly filmed and still shocking after forty years - has been so talked about and over analyzed that there is probably not much more to say. But let me add a few thoughts about A Clockwork Orange, after having recently seen it again after perhaps some twenty years.
First, the movie has three clear and differentiated acts. In the first act, we see Alex and his gang commit outrageous acts of violence, rape and eventually murder against helpless citizens in a futuristic London. In the second act, Alex is caught and sent to prison, where he is "cured" through an aversion method called the Ludovico technique (involving basically the infliction of pain and nausea on Alex when he is forced to see violent acts in a movie). The third act sees Alex being released back into society, supposedly cured, but he will find it impossible to reintegrate himself to society. If the first act is a clear masterpiece (perhaps the best thing that Kubrick ever made), and the second act is very powerful, the third act I found wanting. It's as if Kubrick (or for that matter, author Anthony Burgess) wasn't very sure about how to wrap the story or what particular message he wanted to give forward.
Lastly, and about the message of the film, there has been some debate on whether this is a right wing (conservative) film or is it a left wing (liberal) film. My feeling is that it cannot be put safely in any of the two categories. Kubrick was too idiosyncratic a director to be put into a neat ideological label. Thus, while the movie's radical critique of contemporary western society might put it in the left category, its skepticism that criminals can be "cured", can be seen as a conservative position. Also conservative might be its skepticism about whether any government bureaucracy can have good intentions toward the people.