Reynicke’s film is essentially a tender portrayal of mental illness. Seconda is a dance obsessed young woman who suffers from agaraphobia. When her mother dies and her father does a runner, she’s left alone in the house. What can save her? Although there’s something faintly predictable about the initial set-up, with its echoes of Repulsion, the film takes wing when Seconda, played with a gamine intensity by Barbara Giordano, finally escapes the house. She collects a lover, kidnaps another would-be lover, and goes on an extended flight of fancy in the woods. The film is whimsical, floating between dirty naturalism and heightened fantasy sequences. Whilst there are echoes of Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, it is also reminiscent of another recent Swiss movie, Alloys, (d Tobias Nölle), which in a similar manner dealt with the threads linking society, alienation/ atomisation and mental health. It makes one wonder what they’re putting in the Swiss water. This seeming land of plenty is actually peopled by lost souls struggling to come up with a means of coping with the complexity of the big wide world; the lure of escaping into a fantasy world proving far more enticing.
No comments:
Post a Comment