The best film "Taxidermia" (Chinese translation "Human Statue", "One Hundred Years") at the 2006 Hungarian Film Festival Madness", "The Pursuit of Immortality"), the most controversial film at the Cannes Film Festival, the review is the same: magnificent provided you can stomach it. After watching the movie, I feel that this evaluation is really appropriate. A movie that makes you want to vomit an hour later, but it's a pretty deep and even wonderful movie. Such an evaluation should be enough to show the tension of the film itself. It is a very strange and intriguing film. The film adopts a three-paragraph plot structure, with a slightly surreal style of images, telling us the story of three generations of grandparents who have gone through different historical eras in Hungary. Different from the previous films of the same type, which showed the historical process and the evolution process of individual growth in a macroscopic manner, "Human Statue" always focuses on the deeper issue of "human nature", and conducts an in-depth analysis of it. Excavating the entire film can be called a direct presentation of grotesque realism: centered on the flesh, gluttony, vomiting, excretion, intercourse, masturbation, self-abuse... All kinds of physiological functions are emphasized to the extreme, giving people a great impact. Here, I think of Pasolini's "120 Days of Sodom", which is also a heretic. Because the body has become the dominant object of anonymous and invisible structural power, an institutionalized machine, and the last and only means of resistance for individuals with nowhere to go, all of which reveal a pressing coldness. It was the loneliest cold without any political promise and religious soothing—to become a tame machine, or to die in the color of personal consciousness. A fable about the body\politics of domination/obedience/rebellion.
The film consists of three parts: grandfather, father, and son, which represent the three historical stages of Hungary, namely the World War II period, the socialist period and the post-socialist period. The first story is called "Sperm", which means "Semen". His grandfather was an army officer and enjoyed the dominant authority. His use of power was overflowing, breaking through the proper boundaries arbitrarily, thus forming a totalitarian autocracy over his subordinates. The protagonist of the story is a young servant of a Hungarian army officer during World War II. Although he has an almost crazy desire for the opposite sex, driven by his sexual desire, he uses lighters and ice water to stimulate his sexual organs. ; he sucks the bath water of two women reluctantly; he masturbates while watching them play; he imagines a pile of live pork as a female carcass... Rules and discipline shape and construct Mossolov For a tame body, appear in a specific time and space strictly according to the given norms - what time do you wake up, what time do you practice, what time do you boil hot water for the boss, what time do you make breakfast... and then, what time Feed the pigs, and finally, go back to the hut to sleep at what time. The regularization of location means the fixation of time and space, which is as small and unfree as a birdcage. But even so, the undercurrent of rebellion is surging. The driving force of rebellion comes from the body—the desire impulse of the body—the highly individualized psychological compensation, the redemption of the self—always trying to break through the barriers of all normative institutions and seek pleasure satisfy. The objects of Mosolov's desire were the officers' two daughters and their plump wives (they were the only members of the opposite sex in the barracks) - after the two daughters had finished enjoying his hot bath water, he bent down and buried his head deeply. Dirty water, sniffing greedily - what a vulgar and powerful erotic expression! The gray way of living of a humble individual is also reflected in every night, in a dirty and small space, what is staged is a carnival show of masturbation - the beginning of the film is full of obscene meaning: he kisses fire, uses candles The erogenous zones of the body are grilled for even greater excitement, and at the end, the genitals metaphorically breathe out (what a brazen exaggeration). His physical impulse forced him to repeatedly break through the "no peeping" rules. Every breath, every laughter, and every inch of their skin became a crazy temptation, provoking masturbation behavior - he stretched his organs into it and smeared it. A hole in the greased wall, a rooster gave a curious peck in the retractable room, and everything came to an end in the screams - a heavy black humor that makes people laugh out of laughter. The logic seems to be this: the lower class is deprived of all possibilities of object satisfaction, and is forced to be driven back from the outside world to their own bodies, relying on imagination or recollection of satisfying experiences to obtain pleasure and enjoyment. Although helpless, but after all, there is still a small space to use the broken body. The ultimate freedom - using the body as a pleasure-producing machine rather than an instrument of enslavement. The film maintains a cruel irony of this humble freedom by reproducing this instinctive sense of human nature by shooting a gunshot behind the sergeant's back when he hurriedly put on his pants, and died on the pile of pig carcasses he had raped. Centralized violence!
The problem of appetite in the second story of the film, "Saliva" (meaning saliva). When my father was born, he clipped a pig's tail to his grandfather (an officer). This is undoubtedly a body metaphor and transformation. It turned out that he was indeed a pig kept in captivity by socialism. Weber argued that socialist society cannot eliminate or even reduce human alienation, on the contrary, it will lead to a deepening of alienation by strengthening bureaucracy—socialism completely controls the entire economic structure, strictly standardizing the process of production and consumption. Standardize and strengthen control over individuals through scientific and technological means. As Gramsci said, it hijacks the whole of democratic life. The essence of this extreme bureaucratic autocracy is totalitarianism of total control. Every ordinary person is a labor component on the socialist production machine, without exception, incorporated into the overall chain of means-ends. The fate of the father is given in this way: for the national honor (the fictional Olympic Games will set up a fast food competition), the father must be trained and cultivated to be a king with an amazing appetite and a surprising speed. Decades of festivals add to the fun, showing off the victory of materialism through the act of eating frantically and plump bodies, showing that socialism is a rich paradise. He and they, and his wife, kept eating, and then vomited out what they had just eaten with medication. Absurd acts against humanity because they are used only as instruments of institutional discourse. They are even more miserable than orderlies because they are deprived of basic control over their bodies, such as the freedom to eat. In his later years, it is already a post-socialist period, he has become a piece of meat that cannot move, he is still eating, constantly watching the Olympic fast food competition on TV, complaining that his ambitions are not fulfilled, and he has not been able to achieve the sublime. Honor to realize the greatest value of life. You can't help but marvel at the extremes that people are enslaved and shaped by politics. The second era is an era of puffy "pigs". Eating here is not a description of appetite. Eating is a kind of exercise, a "Great Leap Forward" style performance, a kind of imaginary competition between socialist countries, and finally The result is a physical (economic) crossover.
The third paragraph is "Blood", but the film does not tell the story of murder and violence in the general sense, but explores the topic of "eternity and immortality". The protagonist is the son. He was surprisingly thin, as if a denial of his father's excess or overkill, and, paradoxically, he was a taxidermist by profession. He goes to see his father once a week, brings food and cleans, and takes care of a few fat racing cats; he has a crush on a female cashier, which may be one reason he puts up with the world. A few weeks after his confrontation with his father, he went shopping to see his father, the cashier was replaced by a man, and the world suddenly darkened; when he got home, he found his father dead, his rectum and internal organs were taken out, and the floor was in a mess. Blood and feces smeared the cat's face. He made his father a specimen, an immortal work of art. He then committed suicide out of disappointment and guilt. He calmly cut open his body with a knife, and a visual feast of anatomy unfolded before our eyes - the bright red muscles under the pale skin (which seemed no different from pork), the tendons, and then, the internal organs were taken out one by one, and then , stitched the empty body with thread, and finally, fixed, a sharp knife cut off the head cleanly with a gorgeous wind. At the end of the film, we see the artwork in the museum: a Greek-style human figure with a headless, severed arm. This is of course the last metaphor: the image of human existence under the influence of rational political discourse strangulation, castration, repression, and mechanical violence without thought (head cut off), without action (arm cut off). This is an additional progressive resistance, making it a "specimen of the system". Based on complete self-awareness and self-understanding, this kind of self-reflection and transformation of the body overcomes the conservative cowardice of the fear of death, and after a series of self-design and punishment, achieves final liberation. The third era is the era of sequelae. After the disintegration of the socialist country, it suddenly becomes an embarrassing and abnormally thin man who is not liked by anyone. Every day, he faces his father who has become a pile of fat and lived by memories. Under such circumstances, both father and myself are made specimens for others to study and become immortal specimens of history.
This film is a wonderful combination of art, reality and thought. The director integrates these parts very well. The tools he uses are: political metaphors of sex and body, absurd narrative, the evolution from totalitarian society to post-totalitarian landscape, paranoia And the strange imagination, the perfect three-stage structure, the Eastern European art bloodline from Kafka to Yang Swan Meyer. The use of these elements makes the film's absurd realism style incisively and vividly: the fire-breathing phallus, the semen that shoots into the sky and turns into a star, the absurd hallucination caused by extreme desire, the little girl who sells matches is resurrected in the fairy tale book, and then looks forward to the starry sky, There are also amber-like pendant artworks made of babies... and brutal images similar to the usual expressionism: the flesh-like body of the athlete, the fierce, fresh and alive flesh of the cat who is willing to eat the human innards The wriggling, jumping, bloody cutting of human internal organs, and the white onlookers in the exhibition hall of pure white human statues all left a deep impression on me. The film ends in an ultra-modern art gallery, with white buildings, and the audience, dressed in white, looking at the figurines of father and son, listening to the commentary: "That's the main thing...of course, what does everyone say to each other? It is more important to have one's own opinion... For some, it is space; for others, it is time...".
(Note: Some of the text and information in the article are from the video comments of netizens, which have been modified and deleted.)
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