Too many flowers

Rating: 8/10 (6 November 2019)

Sometimes it's okay to be an ugly American. The problem with the young adults in Ari Aster's "Midsommar" is that they're college students. The humanities get them killed. Learned men and women taught these impressionable students not to bring their own preconceived notions of civilization into cultures that reject Western, or Judeo-Christian values. Characters in horror movies are largely stupid, willfully putting themselves into harm's way. "Midsommar" is different. They're global citizens, and acting as global citizens, the undergraduates keep an open mind about customs and atypical human behavior that they don't understand. Being too smart keeps them there. Nobody wants to be accused of being a snob. Besides, one of their friends is a cultist. Everybody loves Pelle(Vilhelm Blomgren), the gentle and soft-spoken Swede, so nobody says anything truly derogatory about his homecoming, except for Mark(Will Poulter), the sardonic American, who quips: "So we're stopping in Waco before going to Pelle's village?"
"Midsommar" can be read as a satire on ethnographic films, such as David and Laura Glen Shapiro's "Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale", a documentary about anthropologist Tobias Scheenbaum who not only studied the cannibalistic diet of Peruvian aboriginals, the Arkmbut tribe, he became a cannibal himself. For sure, the group composition doesn't lend itself to self-preservation. Dani(Florence Pugh) just lost her immediate family in a murder/suicide. Josh(William Jackson Harper) and Christian(Jack Reynor), Dani's boyfriend, are anthropology majors. Mark, however, differs from the rest, because he feels superior to these pagan cultists. Without permission, Mark vapes, as if he owns the place, never once taking into account that smoking of any sort could be against their laws. "Those girls are walking funny," Mark observes, when the female villagers gather wildflowers in a backwards motion. Unfortunately, he takes a nap at the wrong time. If Mark was present for the attestupa, ritualized suicide in which village elders step off a steep cliff, maybe, just maybe, he could have caused a louder commotion, joining Simon(Archie Madekwe) and Connie(Ellora Torchia) in a chorus of American privilege, by calling a spade a spade: This is b****** crazy. And with a running start, lead his friends through the Scandinavian woods.
Babette Hersant(Stephanie Audrane) had no place to go. Her husband and son were among the French civil war fatalities, collateral damage in a counter-revolutionary insurrection against the Paris Commune, a radical Socialist movement that governed France for a short period in 1871. The Marxists were overthrown during what became known as La semaine sanglante(a.k.a. "The Bloody Week"), when the regular army brought France back to normal order. Babette, suddenly, caught on the wrong side of history, escaped to Jutland, living alongside provincials who believed that "earthly love and marriages were considered of scant worth and merely empty illusion". Circumstances being what they were, this doctrine suited Babette just fine. Two women, Phillipa(Bodji Kjer), a budding opera singer in her youth, and Martine(Birgitte Feerspiel), the sister that doesn't sing, who could have been the wife of a high-ranking general, employs Babette as their live-in maid. Their father, an orthodox Papist minister(Pouel Kern), simply known as "Papa", in "Babette's Feast", a film by Gabriel Axel, invented a religion seemingly designed to prevent his daughters from leaving the commune. Being that his congregants are cut off from the larger part of Denmark, a demagogue like the pastor can invent bylaws that are atypical from societal and religious norms. The women are celibate, in essence, nuns, but instead of being married to God, both daughters seem engaged to their father, perpetually saving themselves for a wedding night that never arrives. Visitors come and visitors go, recognizing the place for what is; a cult, one man's own private Pietistic conventicle. Lorens(Jarl Kulie), as a young man, can't get anywhere with Martine because romantic love is against her religion. The disservice done to Phillipa by this Protestant sect is even worse. Under the tutelage of Achille Papin(Jean-Phillipe Lafont), a famed Parisan opera singer, Phillipa was destined to become a famous diva, before she suddenly puts a kibosh to the idea of fame and fortune, and perhaps, love, when she chooses this cult of personality over Papin, her safe passage to the real world. It's a human horror neither man wants any part of. Arguably, they don't fight hard enough for the women they love.
As May Queen, a title Dani wins in a dance competition that rewards endurance, she holds the power of life over death. Dani gets to choose the ninth human sacrifice for a purging ceremony that entails being burned alive. When her victory was still in doubt, this orphan, wanting to share with somebody her excitement, looks toward the sideline for Christian, who refuses to make eye contact with her. "Does he feel like home to you?" Pelle had asked her. No, he doesn't. In that instant, she makes a snap decision: Harga, a commune in rural Sweden, seemingly a million miles away from America, becomes her new living space. She pardons Torbjorn(Mihaly Kaszas), the pagan, the "lucky" lottery winner", and selects her boyfriend for temple duty. During the ritual, Christian wears the skin of a bear that had recently been specially disemboweled for the occasion. Ironically enough, back at her dormitory room, Dani had kept a painting that showed a little girl peering into the face of a giant brown bear. The painting can be interpreted this way: The girl, of course, is Dani; she looks to the bear, symbolizing formalized religion, for help in getting over the loss of her older sister and parents, but is let down, just like how Christian, her boyfriend, lets her down, by participating in a fertility ceremony. Similar to Babette, the former head chef at the famed Cafe Anglais, in "Babette's Feast", Dani turns her back against the world because everybody she loves is dead.
Babette was once a sensual and vibrant woman, a Parisian, who lived the high life among artists and revolutionaries. With her lottery money, she orchestrates a grand feast for these Jutland provincials as a way of revisiting this past persona, one final time, when the world was her oyster. Babette is content to live out her days as a Puritan. Her employers' father, the minister, as it turns out, was right; "happiness" was an illusion.
The final shot in "Midsommar" is a close-up of Dani, smiling.
She is born-again.
A pagan.