Do things just happen?

Rating: 6/10 (24 November 2009)

I watched this movie yesterday. As soon as I left the theater, something quite unusual happened. Its content lost all of its grip on me, while its artistic brilliance stood out almost the more. How could that be? I thought about it and came to the conclusion that the story was not convincing enough to hold itself up, at least not for me.
I often like stories even if they are unconvincing. Why not this one? If somebody tries to tell something, just as it happened and without explanation, what he tells has to be plausible to be of interest to me. It must be capable to bear some kind of logical explanation to keep my imagination. Otherwise my interest jumps from the story to the person who talks.
The schoolteacher's suggestion sounds too much like an intellectual construction, including the events leading up to it, and some grey eminence caught playing God by his own children would indeed look rather cheap. In fact, the whole story seems too much constructed for me to be taken in by it permanently, too constructed to even appear to be true. In consequence, all the breathtaking scenes of parental violence and abuse seem corrupted, damaged, invalidated, almost lost by their involvement into the context of an unbelievable story. How sad.
The movie had my interest in a firm grip until the very end and then lost it as an intrinsic provocation to be thought over. There seemed nothing more to it than the excellent artistic surface I had already witnessed.
Things happen, and in peculiar atmospheres peculiar things happen. Like gives birth to like, I knew that before. Everybody knows and maybe fears those suffocating circumstances where nothing really happens apart from a series of cruel events passing by, interrupted by bumping holes like being processed by a stuttering slaughter machine. So what all this brilliance for?
Under an intriguing surface, things happen in cruel innocence, mechanically interlinking two generations, devoid of even the possibility of anything like responsibility, not to speak soul, maybe with the exception of two little boys. Apart from those, every single beautiful puppet in this movie carries a white ribbon around his very clock-like heart which never gets soiled, never could be.
Which makes this movie exactly alike to what it depicts. That seems frightening, at least to me. What happens now, in 2009, is this movie, a work of art, ironically, like it's pre-WWI-content, imposing itself as the result of thousands of years of civilization. Too old compared to those two little boys?
I'm just a usual guy and not much of a critic or writer, that's true. But a nightmare of only analogically connected random events, even if it was history itself, I would not consider as true or for that matter real, what ever its aesthetics might be.
I searched the comments on this page for some controversy, thinking this movie deserves it.