Arvostelut (1)
(If you do not appreciate or cannot handle European art, do not enter!) In the middle of the Californian desert, a group of three women, under the dominance of a despotic high priestess of the cult of human (female?) pain, decides to enter voluntary isolation, hermetically sealed off from the outside world, and men especially. We do not know whether they were led here by purely personal trauma or a human (woman's?) inexplicable obsession with addiction as Schroeter himself supposedly said. With the arrival of a sensitive outsider, the story eventually turns into a classical tragedy - and from it, it takes its character and form, or is complemented by it. Opera music, costumes, and some visual compositions are almost kitschy Baroque – what kind of juxtaposition did Schroeter intend with that? If we add purely film finesse, such as the long shots often taken in large units, we get an enigmatic affair filled with content and formal challenges for the viewer. There are several suggestions to ponder: is the desire to emancipate oneself from the (male?) world and surrender to pain, and torment in the form of a tyrannical ruler - notice that it is a woman - a warning that it is premature or unworthy because death or pain will come anyway (the desert will come to us anyway, so why seek refuge in it during life)? Is the film a pessimistic realization of the impossibility of escaping addiction, both in the past (the classics) and in the present (the demented song "Rum and Coca Cola"), whether by the masters of the world being men (the past) or its potential (female) future embodied in a reduced scale by the desert female community?
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