[written January 4, 2007]
Best film of 2006, in my opinion. Just a stunning film. I was in love with it early on and then it took fascinating turn after fascinating turn and just became deeper and deeper.
It’s a truly sublime, sensual film that manages to communicate the power of scent through its medium’s power of visual imagery, through an incredibly seductive engagement in sensuality.
The film is a wonderful meditation on contingency and the pained desire for eternal possession of what is only contingent and passing and fleeting. It’s a film about the rise of beauty and love out of the muck and filth and violence of the filthiest modes of life.
It is the greatest screen portrayal of a super villain I have ever ever seen. It is a truly great and unconventional seriel killer film that manages not just to explore the narcissism, sociopathy, possessiveness, and desire for consumption that drives the seriel killer’s pathology, but also to make the viewer feel it by making the purity and intensity and aesthetic drive of the villain relatable in a perverse way; making the viewer forget the monstrous detachment from humanity is an abberation—the way the monster himself has let himself let his desire overwhelm any social feeling.
It is a visionary portrait of evil, of demagoguery, of genius, of beauty, of power, and of love.
It is a legend that plays like 18th Century science fiction.
And in a few scenes, it gives a fascinating portrait of what Nietzsche characterized as the Dionysian/Apollinian dynamic but I shall not elaborate here out of spoiler concerns. Perhaps in another post for those who’ve seen the film already.
I just loved it. I couldn’t get over it when I got out of it, my head was swimming.
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