jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Hard-working German actor Jürgen Vogel plays the serial rapist Theo in Matthias Glasner’s almost unbearably grim The Free Will (Der Freie Wille). When we meet Theo, he’s heavy-set and angry, working at the cafeteria of a seaside youth hostel. Within minutes of the film’s beginning, he spots a potential victim, knocks her off a bicycle and drags her into the dunes, where he ties her up, rips off her clothes, beats and rapes her in a brutal sequence that seems designed to weed out those audience members who won’t have the stomach for what’s to come.

When we see Theo again, nine years later, he seems profoundly changed: with a buff body but a docile and contrite manner, he tells his parole board just what they need to hear to release him. Told in handheld scenes with an authentic, documentary feel, Der Freie Wille unflinchingly observes Theo’s struggle to contain his own aggressive desires and insecurities.

Glasner’s script manages to steer clear of any move that could be construed as making excuses for Theo as we follow the tortured paths he takes through the provincial German town, including harrowing scenes in which he follows random women through subway tunnels and darkened streets. Der Freie Wille takes a surprising turn when we’re introduced to Nettie (the striking Sabine Timoteo), a young woman who is just leaving behind her overbearing father.

The brittle love that blossoms between Theo and Nettie is the film’s thorniest conceit. We’re trained to wish happiness on all screen couples, but the heavily fraught intimacy we become a party to here is exceedingly difficult to watch. In fact, without the eye-opening performances by Vogel and Timoteo, the film is impossible to imagine: they don’t seem to be afraid to lay bare their very souls.

Glasner softens the blows with moments of fragile joy, but this is not a film that harbors any illusions that love will conquer all. No doubt, Der Freie Wille goes places where not everybody will want to follow, but it stays emotionally true to its frightful subject and finds moments of startling honesty at the extremes of what audiences can endure.

Benten Films will release The Free Will on DVD in the U.S. later this year.

Der Freie Wille. Matthias Glasner, 2006. ****

• Review in Der Spiegel
• The trailer:

More than with any film I’ve seen at the New York Film Festival so far, I’ve been struggling to find a way to talk about Brian De Palma’s Redacted, a movie that attempts to recreate the appalling images which have been systematically removed from the “news” about Iraq. The devastating reconstruction of the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl by American soldiers in Samarra in 2006, told entirely through “found” footage, the film felt like a well-aimed punch to the gut — or perhaps a stab in the heart. Whether blunt or sharp, the film’s impact is impossible to dismiss. Even though I thought I was handling the brutalities on screen well (usually by leaning over to scribble something in my notebook), I found myself unable to get up once the final credits started to roll; it had become physically impossible to move. Redacted sent me reeling.

Read my review on About.com.

Redacted. Brian De Palma, 2007. ****

• More from the NYFF

What’s better than Snakes on a Plane? Of course: worms in the brain. Another gleeful B-picture, a cross between Invasion of the Body Snatchers, either Blob, and any number of zombie movies. There are the usual wisecracks (most of them delivered by Firefly’s Nathan Fillion), a cursing mayor, a teenage girl whose painted fingernails come in handy. What sets Slither apart is how genuinely disturbing the horror elements are. The psychosexual connotations of Michael Rooker’s transformation into an oozing, tentacled squid are obvious; the takeovers of new host bodies play like alien rape, and the grand finale is only a few blinks away from hentai. More than just a cynical recreation like Eight-Legged Freaks, Slither deploys its shock effects like it really means it.

Slither. James Gunn, 2006. ***

[tags]film, horror, 3 stars, james gunn, elizabeth banks, nathan fillion, scifi, monsters, horror, sex, hentai, rape, tentacles, worms[/tags]

A new disc from the Criterion Collection can feel a little bit like trying a new vegetarian dish. Sometimes it’s juicy and delicious, sometimes you feel like you ought to like it just because it’s oh-so-healthy (and then you’re glad you did), and sometimes it’s broccoli rabe.

Robert Bresson’s final black-and-white film, an adaptation of a tragic novel by Georges Bernanos, delivers a striking portrait of abject poverty. The early scenes, when young Mouchette shuffles on oversize clogs between school and flop house home (drunken father, wasting mother, screaming baby) are quite affecting. Bresson is up to his usual exposition-less tricks, and the stark naturalism is bracing. Mouchette is unloved at home and abused at school, so who’s to blame her when she throws some mud at the pretty classmates in their fancy dresses? But then, she turns out to be a character with no options, and storylines involving a) poachers and b) epileptics and c) rapists are always a problem for me. When there are poaching rapists with foaming epileptic seizures, I’m in deep trouble. Au Hasard Blathazar struck me as sublime evocation of suffering, but here, after only 81 minutes, I was just glad that the suffering–Mouchette’s and mine–was finally over. The DVD comes out tomorrow.

Mouchette. Robert Bresson, 1967. **

[tags]2 stars, film, french, robert bresson, criterion collection, tragedy, suffering, poachers, epileptics, rape, poverty, alcoholism, suicide[/tags]