Looking Backward Through the Looking Glass

Rating: 8/10 (30 December 2007)

The film is deeply funny because of the grossness of the concrete realization of the argument of the plot. It is muddy, dirty, crawling in a corridor, perverting in the most grotesque way Alice in Wonderland looking through the looking glass and sharing an apartment with an ill-mouthed parrot and a chimpanzee. The hole in the hedge is a rat hole in the wall and the only attractive thing in it is the glass doorknob. Then the plot is absolutely funny. It is based on one person being able to crawl inside another person and impose his or her personality onto that other person. That's strange but very fast it becomes ah ah because of the identity of the person inside and the identity of the person with whom the inhabited one is having relationships, discussions, rapports, even intercourse of course. In a way it is perverted since a woman can live her love for another woman by accepting her to be in the man that is the vessel of that intruder or invader. If the man is invaded by a woman and has a personal relationship with another woman, the two women are making love, to the point of procreating a girl, their daughter. That's definitely ah ah. Then the film deals with phantasms in the heads of Western men and women. Everyone wants to be able to make their desires and emotions towards anyone whatsoever real. But after all you have to keep some appearances, as a British TV series about a certain Mrs Bouquet used to say, and that's how the inhabited human vessel can enable so many possible connections to take place. Then it shows that success in our society does not depend on the value you have but on the value the public persona you are living in has. If you live in the body of a great person anything you will do will be successful and seen at once as great. Finally, and that's the punch scene at the end of the film, this possibility to transit from one person to another will enable some old people to get into younger bodies and live forever. The very fundamental myth of the Western world, but a myth they have never dared to realize in a religious belief or philosophical theory. The Buddhist did it but not the Christians, nor the Moslems, nor the Jews, the three Semitic religions. So Hollywood is playing the role of the provider of eternity to the few who will believe it because they have always dreamed of it. Blessed be the gullible,  So all in all a funny film that makes you feel at times kind of ill at ease.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines