Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Innocence
Physical State: achey
Mental State: boomerangy
Music: Efterklang - Tripper - YES STILL
Fashion sense: black t-shirt, jeans
Word of the day
sloth
n. Aversion to work or exertion; laziness; indolence.
Any of various slow-moving, arboreal, edentate mammals of the family Bradypodidae of South and Central America, having long hooklike claws by which they hang upside down from tree branches and feeding on leaves, buds, and fruits, especially: A member of the genus Bradypus, having three long-clawed toes on each forefoot. Also called ai1, three-toed sloth. A member of the genus Choloepus, having two toes on each forefoot. Also called two-toed sloth, unau. A company of bears.
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Yeah so Innocence. Whew how can I describe this flick? It is a gothic tale based on a story by German playwright Frank Wedekind and it's a bit of an allegory about the transition from being a girl to being a woman (something I don't have a lot of experience with). The story takes place at this bizarre boarding school for girls that seems a bit Orwellian at first glance. Girls are brought into the school in a coffin, they take the ribbon of the girl above them in age and the oldest one takes off nightly for some kind of training until they're shipped off. The girls are taught how to dance and about biology and are not allowed outside the walls of the school. If you're truly exceptional you get chosen by the Headmaster and where you go is not made clear. Most of the girls go through this development process and then move on to somewhere else (which is never described until later). If a girl questions what is going on they are punished. One surmises that the teachers and some of the other servant women must have done some terrible things to have remained behind to be guardians for the young girls. It is all very confusing and allegorical (much like a lot of Wedekind's work). The film is beautifully shot and styled as well and I thought that at times it was like watching a Lynch film, exquisite and colourful and totally confusing. The dvd of course has no subtitled interviews with the director Lucile Hadzihalilovic so it remains very much a mystery to me. Maybe it's not supposed to mean anything and you are to make up your own decisions about what it says.
