THE BRUTALIST

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A PRISON OF ONE'S OWN DEVISING

Brady Corbet Paints Himself Into a Corner

By Cole Smithey

 

Director/co-writer Brady Corbet has made an overwrought, unlit, postwar [fictional] epic with an unreliable protagonist that is as frustrating as any movie you will ever see.

An utter lack of pacing variety, dangling sub-plot threads, and a tacked-on ending make this four-hour audience investment hardly worth the effort.

Fictional Hungarian Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) celebrates his liberation from a Nazi concentration camp by escaping to America, the land of a colder more hidden version of Nazi ideology.

László's Philadelphia-based furniture store-owning cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) proves to be an ersatz Nazi collaborator who, since moving to the States, has married a shiksa and switched to Catholicism. In no time at all cousin László wears out his welcome with considerable help from Attila's racist wife. Welcome to America sucker.

A gratuitous subplot involving a black coal worker (Isaach de Bankolé) and his son, gives way to László being hired by Guy Pearce's little Hitler Harrison Lee Van Buren, a narcissistic millionaire intent on subjugating László as his own personal Jewish architect slave. Van Buren has a real hard-on for his self-imposed prisoner László.

Under Van Buren's thumb (cough), László designs a gargantuan monolithic "institute" (church) that looks every bit the prison of claustrophobic holocaust nightmares.

László Tóth is no Frank Lloyd Wright.

Is László taking a piss at his blue-eyed capitalist warder by designing the ugliest fucking prison-like structure you've ever seen? Perhaps.

The claustrophobic building's focal point involves an upside-down crucifix that sunlight shines through.

Weird.

The sexually impotent, heroin-addicted László fulfills his updated concentration camp existence when he forwards his payment for Van Buren's project toward its completion to his own specifications.

Victim-hood is its own reward.

László's wheelchair-bound wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) enters the movie a half-hour too late, and even then does little to relieve the fictional narrative's doom and gloom trajectory.

"The Brutalist" doesn't know what it wants to say. Is it anti-Zionist? anti-Capitalist? anti-socialist? anti-Bauhaus? No idea.

I do know that "The Brutalist" is an exploitation movie in love with its own misery.

No amount of editing or color-correcting can save this film from itself.

Save the back-slapping for Sean Baker's "Anora."

Rated R. 215 mins.

ZERO STARS

NEKROMANTIK 2 — SHOCKTOBER!

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In the brainwash of modern ideologies it seems apropos that Jörg Buttgereit’s follow-up to his banned 1987 horror film “Nekromantik” would also be prohibited in his mother country of Germany, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, and a slew of other countries. After all, “Nekromantik 2” exploits the same taboo conceit as the original film, namely the erotic and romantic tension between an attractive girl and a corpse. As with the first movie, a real-life boyfriend just gets in the way.

From a filmmaking standpoint Jörg Buttgereit’s potent stab at transgressive cinema is more in line with the early films of John Waters or David Cronenberg than with the litany of directors associated with torture porn movies of the “Saw” franchise ilk. It would be sad to say that by modern standards, the “Nekromantik” movies are tame by comparison; they are not. Jörg Buttgereit’s consciously low budget approach prods the viewer to question obvious aspects of the film’s production. You might take a believable corpse for granted in a big budget film, but be taken by surprise by the apparent authenticity of the dead body getting all of the attention here. Buttgereit’s convincing Grand Guignol trump card might be one of the oldest tricks in the book, but it works like a charm.

The film’s title tells you what you need to know. Romance with the dead is a heavy burden in every way imaginable. Set in the downtrodden streets and apartments of East and West Berlin the story picks up with Rob, the abandoned boyfriend from the first film, committing suicide with a knife while achieving orgasm. Death and sex are united. Enter Monika; a fan of Rob’s former exploits with the dead, to dig up his decomposing green body for some quality time between the sheets. Still, Monika learns that necrophilia isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Her attempted sex act with what’s left of Rob sends her running to the bathroom to vomit. She chops up the body, bags it up, and returns it to its grave, albeit with one set of naughty bits kept behind in the fridge as a souvenir, or l'objet de fetish if you will, or if you won't.

A chance meeting at a local cinema delivers Monika into the loving arms of Mark, a voice-over talent for cheap porn movies. As romance seems to grow between the couple, so too does Monika’s recurrent desire to make it with a cadaver.

It is one thing to show a Hollywood action hero killing an endless army of nameless people, but widely considered beyond the pale to show a character acting out carnal fantasies with a corpse. Sure it’s gross, but is it any worse or better than other popularized filmic expressions of murder or sexual expression? This is one of the essential ideological questions that Buttgereit wrestles with in an ambitious adult horror movie that is as much about the audiences that will never see it as it is about a commercialized culture of war.

German officials have come around to accepting the “Nekromantik” films as works of art, and have since renounced their ban.

Not Rated. 104 mins. 

I STAND ALONE — SHOCKTOBER!

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Desolation of the human soul is the provocation for Gaspar Noé’s dead-end French antihero, a nameless, broke 50-something butcher (played by the commanding Philippe Nahon). Nahon’s insidiously repulsive narcissist carries all the marks of a card-carrying right-wing extremist. Self-loathing, racist, misogynistic, and shaking with pedophiliac desires, Noé’s existential everyman of moral depravity narrates his life story. It reads like a bad acid trip.    

Growing up as an abandoned child during World War II leads to the adult butcher owning his own meat shop. His mute 13-year-old daughter appears with blood on her panties. Believing his daughter was raped, he chases the suspect with a knife, but accidentally stabs an innocent man. Several years in prison leave the butcher briefly ready to “reset the counter” on his life. It doesn’t take long for that fantasy to fade. The setting is France circa 1980. Our hateful man (with the metaphoric and literal occupation title that describes him) questions his morality while wandering Paris on the run after pummeling his pregnant girlfriend, thereby killing their baby. Noé’s dual-antagonist-protagonist earns no empathy from his audience.

The Argentinian filmmaker uses simple but dynamic stylistic devices, such as a single gunshot sound effect, to emphasize sudden leaps in the butcher’s progressively offensive inner monologue of discontent and rage. Noé isn’t above using cheap gimmicks to toy with his audience, as when “ATTENTION” flashes across the screen before giving the audience “30 seconds to leave the screening of this film,” with only 20 minutes left. Rest assured any weak-kneed viewers would already have exited the cinema long before Noé’s tongue-in-cheek alert.

“I Stand Alone” (Gaspar Noé’s feature debut) is as much a philosophical denunciation of humanity as it is a thought-provoking treatise on mental illness as a socially communicable disease. The suicidal butcher’s cynical philosophy has flashes of clarity amid bouts of violent actions and bloody fantasies. Love may be the only remedy for the butcher’s nagging death wish but even that comes as a sick travesty.

Not Rated. 81 mins.