Cracked necks. Bodies stabbed by those showing the guts. Faces crashed into masses of mince adorned with eyeballs. Blood, semen and vomit dripping, gushing and dripping from various holes and wounds. Sex parties where participants’ genitals change shape. All these shocking images and many more accumulate in the footage of ‘The Infinity Pool’, which has already decided to consider it the most obscene and scandalous of all the films to be released in 2023.; Of course, it’s too early to reward that recognition, but anyone intent on earning it next has a tough opponent to beat.
Just introduced Berlinale out of competition,’Infinity Pool seems to confirm Brandon Cronenberg’s determination to establish himself as an even more extreme filmmaker than his father.Pioneer of this genre of cinema, known in his time as “body fright”. In his feature film debut, ‘Antiviral’ (2012), David’s son put his disturbing images at the service of a critique of our famous obsession and reflects on the loss of individual autonomy in ‘The Owner’ (2020). With this new work, he satirizes the new world economic order that grants the most privileged something like complete impunity..
The protagonist, a mediocre writer (Alexander Skarsgård), spends his holidays with his wife in one of the luxury ‘resorts’ in an unidentified tropical country, an underdeveloped and not entirely democratic place where tourists and residents seem to follow different rules. The man who caused a fatal accident finds himself among a group of dubious hedonists who pursue physical and emotional euphoria through sexuality, sadism, hallucinogenic drugs and addictive use of infamous indigenous technology.
Could ‘The Infinity Pool’ reflect the anxieties and guilt he feels as a result of the privilege his manager’s last name confers on him? It doesn’t seem like that, considering how little he concealed the artistic influence he received from my father. After all, the two Cronenbergs are concerned both with the human tendency to self-destruct and with the interaction between pain and pleasure, or, if you prefer, between violence and eroticism. However, there are important differences between the two: if David’s films maintain a clinical distance from the objects of study, ‘Infinity Pool’ cheers up the lows of its characters with constant visual and sound effects; and if the father is generally indifferent to his audience, here the son displays a certain desperation to shock and shake his. Too bad this provocation, fascinating until it becomes boring and childish, is all that the new movie has to offer.
animated art
Especially since the success of his first feature film ‘Your Name’ (2016), his name has been Makoto Shinkai continues to be associated with a narrative formula whose content includes an unexpected and fateful romance., an adventure to save Japan from disaster and the constant threat of natural disaster; all three feature in the Japanese master’s ‘anime’ amazing new work, which competes for the Golden Bear and should no doubt be part of the winners list to be announced in a few days.
‘Suzume’ chronicles the adventure of an orphan teenager alongside a young man who is devoted to watching a series of interdimensional portals.and mysteriously transformed into a three-legged chair by a talking cat; The couple’s goal is to prevent a giant worm from entering our world and releasing its seismic energy that could take thousands of lives. If the premise sounds complicated, its development is even more; and the movie doesn’t make a great effort to elaborate on the vicissitudes of the plot, partly because the laws of its genre dictate it – complaining that ‘anime’ movies are complicated is like complaining that musical cinema is full of singing characters – and partly, anyway, Because the meaning of this journey is above all metaphorical: ‘Suzume’ is the story of a girl who must overcome her mother’s death, and a whole country that must heal the great wound her mother has caused. 2011 earthquake and tsunami. But above all, ‘Suzume’ is another testament to its author’s ability to design dazzling and overwhelming images. This is truly an extreme cinema.