Dionysos

A brutally precise post-sorella film for Latin America that somewhat misses every box in which the viewer would automatically want to put it, and it is precisely this missing that leads to its greatness. It just needs a few short speeches of self-confusing introspection of the main character and a few scenes whose musical motif and overtly parodied filming undermine the seriousness of the situation, and the blocks of capitalist slave masters, carved by workers, take on a completely different meaning than the precise fulfillment of their function in the historical drama of a class on the path to realization. Paradoxically, the author didn't add anything to the characters' false chimera of psychological depth (which none of us have ever had), but still remains at a higher level, albeit still just a "mere" function, allowing them to perish in the hundreds in the audiovisual dramatization of the choreography of the idea of execution and brutal injustice, reminiscent of works of this type by Miklos Jancso.

Godard as a postmodern Master of Film deconstruction, both the deconstruction of image meanings and words. That is, what shapes human reality if it were not actually a constructed fiction? Or, as stated in the introduction, a person escapes from fantasy into reality (whose basis can only be fantasy), from Nature into Metaphor (the names of the two chapters of this film). This is another Godard film to prove to us that our phantasmic reality consists only of randomly assembled fragments of images, sounds, and sentences, whose meaning becomes perfectly empty and incomprehensible when taken out of their established context - until we put them together into a new unity. Even though that will only be a reflection of our inner consciousness, moving in metaphors, concepts, and abstract meanings that separate us from the real world. However, the dog does not suffer from this, as Rilke already knew, and therefore man can discover the lost Nature/reality through the perspective of an animal, the only perspective from which man can observe the external world and not just his internal, conscious world (the world of fragments of words and sentences, fragments of films and books). All you need to do is follow the basic pairs: love and death, suffering and that world. And especially Godard's dog. /// Jean-Luc Godard again follows the trail of the point at which every totalization shatters, the point where infinity opens up - whether it is the infinity of possible paths of society, the past, and the future, images (...) - and with it, freedom. /// Otherwise, at 84 years old, Jean-Luc Godard has more ideas with form than any Hollywood "god." Examples of this include demonstrating 3D by allowing a dialogue between people sitting behind each other (who would normally overlap in 2D) or by splitting the image and then allowing it to merge again (creating another alienation effect, which he has been exploring since the beginnings of his work). /// I saw the film in both 3D and 2D in the movie theater - definitely seek out the 3D version because, without it, one of the three Godards is simply missing from the screen.

How to liberate the suffering when suffering is the means to fulfill their desires – Hirszman performs a cut into the morality of the Brazilian petite bourgeoisie, in which the struggle of the favelas and poverty against the external/class enemy is replaced by the internal struggle of the declining petit bourgeois against themselves. The wife, representing a model hysterical structure in which there is a constant shifting of her own life dissatisfaction onto new objects, finds her complement in the husband's inability not only to find work but to not even look for work: any real resistance á la traditional cinema novo is inconceivable for the protagonists who enjoy their own satisfaction in privacy. As the film (and probably its literary source) brilliantly shows, the symbolic and intellectual horizon of the protagonists does not go beyond the framework of their class, which lacks the abundance of the upper society and the radicalism of the low classes' poverty, and therefore they need to never have too little but also not too much - the closer that power is, the more internal sabotage occurs (abandoning a lover, squandering easily earned money, etc.). The cornerstone of the work's construction is that it is precisely this view of their class, which regulates and motivates the actions of the main protagonists, that is visibly personified in the character of Glorinha, a wealthier relative – her omnipresence in the field of the protagonists' internal motivation is balanced precisely by her factual absence.

The ship's siren reminiscent of one from a stereotype factory and the roar of a horn announcing the everyday private apocalypse evokes a paradoxical feeling of stagnant harbor water, with the ship stuck in place and yet inevitably drifting towards its end. The farewell balances on the border between life and death in the anxious timelessness of a black and white camera, when the viewer, as tense as the main character, awaits the gust of wind that would finally move the ship aground - in any direction. This perhaps slightly worn-out theme, but always relevant, is elevated by superb direction, especially by the beautiful cinematography.

The text of the drama is read for oneself, before any introduction on the stage: it is not the actor who brings the text to life, but the reader - the empty space of the stage is the world. Space itself, text itself. Love itself. And yet, through this formal emptiness, it is given to us - the audience, to its lovers. The content of ourselves comes with a delay, with even greater force, only to then recede like a wave on the Atlantic coast, momentarily giving way to some prefabricated obsessive motifs of the Durassian universe, one of which is precisely the end of love, departure, flowing, and dissolving. Cut, blackness, extreme film emptiness. Silence. And in that moment, the viewer can once again begin their merging with the text and image, like that shot in which the sky, sea, and beach merge into one.

The pearl necklace explosively unravels disparate scenes of Brazilian carnival dancers from the Third World, connected by a thread of ecstatic resistance against everything that turns misery into misery and turns the poor into the poor - thereby resisting itself. This is formally manifested in irony toward its critical discourses and the discourse of film as such. Perhaps it won't be more stereotypical symbolic violence if I say that this film, in the style of more animalistic late Cinema Novo, activates the strongest of South American temperament. Under the parade of unrestrained images and proclamations, as a viewer in the Sambadrome stands, you can sense their common latent Dionysian energy, a carnal carnival of the will for freedom, redemption, and the struggle in the blood of dignity that will not be tamed by any capitalist, white man from the North, or any critical theory. The will for the growth of life, sprouting from the muck of the global South.

Ferreri explores themes of generational change and decline (and by analogy even entire civilizations) with his typical dark humor in this film. He also delves into the topic he often dissects - men versus women, suggesting that the future will inevitably belong to those damn feminists. The longing and despairing efforts of the older Luigi (Mastroianni) to regain a sense of life are doomed to failure. Even the younger Lafayette (Depardieu) will not ultimately achieve victory, and the joint effort of the two - to raise their own successor in the form of a "male", little King Kong, will end in the irreversible movement of human history: he is devoured by rats, just as only those cursed rats survive every civilization. It is important to remember who passed this judgment on history - precisely the representative of a civilization that has already been condemned and consigned to the dustbin of history (the owner of the Roman History Museum). The tragic realization, especially for Luigi, is revealed in the apparently random or mistaken gender swap of the little monkey in his will.

A convenient connection of two worlds, two moments of human life. At the beginning, the main character drives through the USA - an alienated landscape, alone without deeper meaning or fulfillment in life, yet intensified by the surrounding and local (advertising) way of life. This is followed by a journey across The Netherlands and Germany - initially, the forced care for a child gives the main character feelings of satisfaction and a deeper reason for life. It has wonderful poetry, great cinematography and music, and Wim Wenders...

This film serves as a warning for those who have forgotten how to live after May in the same way they lived during May. At the same time, it is a challenge for those who want to live according to May, even after it, even though they do not yet know what it means. It is because May 1968 was never meant to be the end, but the beginning (similarly to how the events of The Chinese were only the first steps for students discovering revolutionary ideas). Similarly, the story of Him and Her is a movement from the "revolutionary" spring to the gray reality of 1972, where May mainly serves to make one realize what it was all about. It showed the willingness of some to fight for something new, and the willingness of others to maintain the status quo. The disillusionment with the failure of the labor unions, the communist party, and the uncertainty about one's own ideals from May are thus at the beginning of what everyone (in this case, left-wing intellectuals) should realize - it's about finding new content and new forms, outside the framework of the capitalist consumerist system. P.S. The greater responsibility for this film lies more with Gorin than with Godard.

The second part continues exactly where the previous part ended, after the main character's transformation from a white terrorist into a friend of the people. This transformation seemed very poorly managed to me throughout Hungarian Rhapsody: 1st moment = István is bred with the intolerant attitude of the aristocracy, and he cruelly fights on the side of counterrevolution; 2nd moment = István recommends allocating land to retail farmers, in order to "take the wind out of the sails of the reds," so it is clearly just an opportunistic calculating gesture; 3rd moment = István, dressed in peasant rags, sits at the table with the former aristocracy. Nothing happened between moments 2 and 3 that would coherently explain this transformation. Fortunately, this problem no longer exists in Allegro Barbaro (and it is therefore paradoxical that a story in which characters do not transform is better), and we can enjoy the eternal struggle of arrogance and brutality of wealth and power with the suffering and resistance of poverty in the background of passing history. There is no need to talk about the mastery of mise-en-scène, and the playful placement of individual characters is also very pleasing, which is not only the result of clever movement of actors on the stage but also of miraculous film editing.