Rebirth can only come through suffering

Rating: 10/10 (14 April 2009)

This film could have been a melodramatic mash and it is not. In fact the situation and the various developments make it quasi-tragic. Tragic because it is the story of a totally impossible epiphany for a couple who is living in our modern society. There is no escape from the present programmed and even pre-fabricated life in which we all live. We have practically no freedom of choice. The only freedom of choice we do have is to refuse a possible promotion, a potential chance in this life, and we will end up on the dump, the manure pile. There is no choice because we have to pay for the house, the car, the children's education, and so many other things. There is no real choice because our psyches have been pre-determined into accepting the small little tiny wee box that has been attributed to our life. Our psyche is always opportunistic and it always goes the way the wind blows. Even a simple accident, like an unwanted pregnancy, the result of a negligence as for preventive protection, the result of going out bareback when it is well known we are supposed to go out covered, if we want to really have a choice, becomes the direst tragedy of all times. But we are in such a formatted life that we forget something because "they", the big brothers of this brave new world, have mesmerized us into forgetting. There is no simple way out, there is no way out at all. Any attempt at trying to evade the consequences of this event will lead to an even worse catastrophe, like death, or suicide, or death by suicide or suicide by death. Tragic indeed. I will also add that the main two actors are outrageously outstanding. They play their anger, their disorientation, their psychoses, their schizophrenias even with such realism and conviction that we may think they are playing their own roles, their own parts, their own private fate and destiny. It is true the cameraman is also quite prodigious. The way he takes the profile of Di Caprio when this one is supposed to be stubbornly refusing any move brings out this stubborn-ness revealed by the very line of the forehead seen under that profile angle, a Neanderthal or apish profile indeed. It is such details that make an actor and a film remarkable. It is true too that the insane, deranged son of the real estate agent is truer than nature, more prophetic about this society than all the Bibles of the world, than all the Freuds and Marxes of this low, low world of ours.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID