No amount of directorial rhetoric can get around the fact that this is art-house cinema at its worst, a vacuously self-indulgent piece of film-making with nothing original to say at the outset and nothing of value to show at the end of its seemingly interminable running time.
Heavy-handed (in every sense) on a gravity-defying scale, it's not so much that a great deal of the movie's content is visually ludicrous as that all of it is one long wearying and witless redundancy.
This is not an examination (in any sense) of human sexuality, rather one film-maker's parade of her own neuroses on the self-serving, if not entirely self-delusional, premise that they somehow have a universal resonance.
What rubbish -- and what blatant commercial desperation, because each increasingly deliberate attempt to shock and repel serves only to expose the movie's intellectual and artistic bankruptcy.
This isn't the sex of pornography. And it certainly isn't the sex of real life. It's the dehumanised sex of an immature vision that, shorn of its psycho-babble trappings (of which the script is insufferably replete) is likely to be entertained only by the film's author and those gullible enough to think that if something is joyless, it must be important.
One day, this director may have something worth saying that may be worth hearing. On this evidence though, the wait won't be worth enduring, not least because some female director must surely arrive in the meantime with something that explores human sexuality in a way that informs and, ye Gods, maybe even entertains (so that rules out Jane Campion as well).
Then again. . . does world cinema really need another such essay anyway?
Heavy-handed (in every sense) on a gravity-defying scale, it's not so much that a great deal of the movie's content is visually ludicrous as that all of it is one long wearying and witless redundancy.
This is not an examination (in any sense) of human sexuality, rather one film-maker's parade of her own neuroses on the self-serving, if not entirely self-delusional, premise that they somehow have a universal resonance.
What rubbish -- and what blatant commercial desperation, because each increasingly deliberate attempt to shock and repel serves only to expose the movie's intellectual and artistic bankruptcy.
This isn't the sex of pornography. And it certainly isn't the sex of real life. It's the dehumanised sex of an immature vision that, shorn of its psycho-babble trappings (of which the script is insufferably replete) is likely to be entertained only by the film's author and those gullible enough to think that if something is joyless, it must be important.
One day, this director may have something worth saying that may be worth hearing. On this evidence though, the wait won't be worth enduring, not least because some female director must surely arrive in the meantime with something that explores human sexuality in a way that informs and, ye Gods, maybe even entertains (so that rules out Jane Campion as well).
Then again. . . does world cinema really need another such essay anyway?