Monday, July 14, 2014

Borgman

The bourgeois patriarchy finds unconditional support in Alex van Warmerdam's Borgman, a poignantly pointless florescent canker, rifle at the ready, red alert middle-class aesthetics.

While viewing, you may find yourself considering at least two questions, the first, why in hell would anyone make something like this?, the second, is this the pinnacle of paranoid stereotyped fabled uncensored grit, the beast aimlessly targeting the beauty, the arrogance of a stifled hypodermic, unreeling like a Criterion in the making?

The only film to ever remind me of Jerzy Skolimowski's The Shout.

It could have been an after school special direly warning teens not to hitchhike.

Or a film where a plane crashes in Alaska and wolves communally hunt down the survivors.

Instead, suburban peace and tranquility is infiltrated by a troupe of travelling possibly demonic psychopaths, who, in this instance, seek employment in order to use the tools at their disposal to create a platform upon which they intend to put on a show, the couple's wife residing in their grip, the husband, completely oblivious.

Discontent is sewn.

I'm assuming Warmerdam has worked a Dutch fairy tale or legend of some kind into his script, the film seeming as if it's a crisp contemporary take on a medieval horror, with cars and cellphones, although the fact that it seemed that way to me is based on my assumption.

Off they go, into the forest.

If there were still bears in the Netherlands, keeping with the fairy tale hypothesis, they would be on the lookout.

Bears were obviously guardians of the forest in Dutch fairy tales/legends.

I know nothing about the Netherlands.

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