Sunday 10 November 2019

midsommar (w&d ari aster)

There are several levels upon which to read Midsommar. Firstly as a horror film. Here, we encounter the problem that it lacks tension and it’s not particularly scary. The film employs a trope that has been used more effectively by Claudia Llosa (Madeinusa) or Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust) among others, that of the callow Westerners trapped in a tribal society. Four USA grad students (and two aimless Brits) are parachuted into a remote Swedish festival. The fact that ‘the tribe’ is Swedish (blond, white), gives it a twist; it could be said to subvert the stereotypical image of ‘the other’. The art department has a ball, and it all looks pretty, but the studied plot points, as the ‘westerners’ are despatched, feel contrived and only serve to dilute the tension that is supposed to be building around the fate of plucky heroine Florence Pugh, (who does a decent job). Not for the first time, it feels as though a big-budget Hollywood film is suffering from an excess of everything. It’s hard enough to sustain tension over ninety minutes, let alone 147 and the film gradually warps under the weight of its own gravity. The longer it goes on the more the holes in the plot seem to gape and the nods to Von Trier (and even Tarkovsky at the very end?) feel forced, lacking either the discipline peak Von Trier brought to his outrageousness or, of course, the vaulting ambition of Tarkovsky. 

So as a film, whilst Midsommar ticks a lot of pretty picture boxes, and a few gruesome ones, it’s disappointing. However, to return to the connection to Pocock’s Surrender. Pocock visits on a sub-anthropological level various communities in the Midwest. The thing that links these communities is they all have a fierce stance regarding their relationship to nature. As the title Midsommar suggests, the Swedish tribe that Pugh & co visit are steeped in an ersatz relationship to nature. They worship the tree of the ancestors, where the ashes of sacrificed elders are scattered. The festival is also a fertility rite (which chimes with Pocock’s visit to an Ecosex festival). Petals are scattered and trees are venerated. Magic mushrooms are consumed in large quantities in a kind of group shamanic ritual. Yet, in the hands of a Hollywood director, there is still no way to present this world other than as dystopian. In this sense, for reasons that the film seems to be in no way aware of, Midsommar might well be the scariest film of the year. Confronted by the image of a society which seeks to co-exist with nature, the technological military machine which is a Hollywood film production sees itself as having no option but to treat this society as a violent, terrorist threat. 

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