The Bawling and the Insipid Stud

Rating: 2/10 (6 December 2019)

«Midsommar» identifies with a widespread definition among Northern filmmakers that art, while larger and more spectacular, is better, as witnessed from Griffith to Linklater, through Gance, DeMille, Lean, Bondarchuk and even Coppola, along with all the rest. Immersed in music to provoke emotions that the images do not transmit by themselves, it is a film of excessive duration to tell an essentially simple story of fanaticism, cultural shock, materialism and primitivism in a hippie-like community in Sweden, with two pathetic leading characters who have traveled from United States to Scandinavia, and that, at least on my part, did not have my sympathy and did not allow me to connect: a woman who does not stop bawling, clinging to the memory of dead relatives, and a man who, in the end, is nothing more than an insipid stud. Along with the decent photograph of Pawel Pogorzelski, embarrassing and sometimes laughable incidents accumulate: the mating of the flabby stallion with the Swedish little virgin, the millennials' reactions to the sacrifices, the collective hysteria of the community in the Loudon nuns' style, the fake anthropological approach to the story, the bear costume... I don't know why I thought it was a very strange crossing of «Boyhood» with «The Blair Witch Project», «The Wicker Man», «Private Vices and Public Virtues" and «Triumph of the Will». Proceed at your own risk, considering the film has legions of fans, but if you ask me... how I regret having lost those three hours of my life!