I know a few other people here have been catching flicks at the Toronto Fest ... anybody else catch A Hole In My Heart? A very difficult film - seriously, really really really not for the faint of heart or anyone who has issues with sex on screen - but I think one with a very strongly moral point throughout. It had me thinking of Pascal's 'God shaped hole' throughout as these characters tried desperately to pack anything they could into their sense of loss, loneliness and isolation ...

Ack, it didn't occur to me to search for a thread on this film until after I'd posted my thoughts in the VIFF thread. Here is the pertinent paragraph:

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Caught three films today, sort of, but since I slept through much of the third one, it was more like two. First, A Hole in My Heart (Sweden, 98 min.) is the newest film from Lukas Moodysson, whose previous film Lilya 4-ever I found somewhat over-rated, as some of you may recall; it did take an interesting and compelling look at the human sex-slave trade that is apparently taking advantage of impoverished girls in eastern Europe, but as drama, the film was too melodramatic in some moments and too chintzy in others. Moodysson's newest film takes the worst aspects of that earlier film to some pretty harrowing extremes, and one colleague of mine immediately hailed it as one of the worst films he has ever seen. It concerns two men and a young woman making an amateur porn video in an apartment belonging to one of the men, while the man's shy, sulky, and oh-so-sensitive son hides in his room and listens to music. (How sensitive is this son? He talks about the individual "personalities" that earthworms have.) Moodysson mixes the central story with images of Barbie and Ken dolls copulating and destroying each other, as well as with graphic images of various forms of surgery (including labia reduction), and he mixes all these elements together with some pretty abrasive sounds and rapid-fire cuts. At one point, the amateur porn video takes a nasty turn when one guy puts on a ski mask and pulls out a baseball bat and almost rapes the woman, who promptly pulls the rest of her clothes back on and leaves. Since the camera, in following her outdoors, steps outside the apartment for the first time in this film and thus apparently signals a turning point in the narrative, I checked my watch, and saw that only 46 minutes had gone by. Dang, I thought, there are still 52 minutes to go. How will they finish this story? Well, it turns out the woman finds the outside world "boring", so she comes back to the apartment, and away they go at it again -- with the festivities culminating this time in such gross activities as one man vomiting into the woman's mouth while the other man holds it open. Ick. And every now and then, one of the men fantasizes about an innocent world in which he merely lies in the grass. Ah, there's that pretentious chintz again. Definitely a film to avoid. Only my stubborn refusal to leave ANY movie half-watched prevented me from joining the trickle of people who walked out of this one.

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As for the "God-shaped hole" business -- well, yeah, as Christians, we are bound to think of that term whenever someone makes a movie about people living lonely lives and puts the word "hole" in the title; then again, perhaps the word refers to the film's obsession with orifices. Personally, I wonder how it is possible to make a film that depicts sexual and other forms of degradation so vividly without also degrading the actors -- that is, I wonder if such a film can ever REALLY be all that "moral", let alone "strongly" so.

Okay, I haven't waded through the entire Dogville thread but I'm pretty sure you've been saying positive things about that one, Peter, and it's just as degrading to Kidman as this is, though a little less graphic. So where's the distinction? The Pascal reference may be an obvious one but I'm pretty certain it's intentional and I thought it was quite apt ...

twitch wrote:
: Okay, I haven't waded through the entire Dogville thread but I'm pretty sure
: you've been saying positive things about that one, Peter, and it's just as degrading
: to Kidman as this is, though a little less graphic. So where's the distinction?

Heh -- since I saw Dogville much, much later than just about everyone else, you wouldn't have to wade through very much of that thread to see what I've had to say about it -- just start at the end, instead of at the beginning!

As for the degradation thing -- I would say that Kidman merely simulates it, whereas the actors in A Hole in My Heart are actually engaging in it. Kidman and her co-stars do not do ANYthing in Dogville that lowered or undermined my opinion of them as human beings -- it is relatively easy to make the distinction between actor and character, there -- but the actors in A Hole in My Heart do all sorts of things that affect how I seem them as human beings. I can grant that the film is nowhere near as explicit as, say, Ken Park, but it left me feeling similarly dirty.

This is Arts & Faith so this is the place for me to ask this question. It's been bouncing around in my head for quite some time and i'd really appreciate any feedback that's out there.

I normally don't like to approach a film merely from my own response to it if i can somehow find a way to critically engage it at the same time. It seems that the Church at large has moved away from relying only on their feelings, at least in my experience of dealing with worship in the church. Whereas people in the fifties would get very caught up in the blatant euphoria of a worship service, emotions are now considered only part of the equation when approaching worship today. Therefore, i guess i get a little confused as to how a film, another form of art, can be bad only because it makes one feel bad. If it set out to do this and accomplished its purpose, then isn't it actually good? This is not a view i would share with a commoner (although with a quick search i guess anyone could find my feelings on this). I'm just legitimately confused when it comes to this subject.

If the use of art in worship makes one feel good, then they walk out of a service saying it was good; if the use of art in a theater makes one feel bad, then they walk out of the theater saying it was bad. Everything here is only predicated on feelings.

From a faith standpoint, where is the line drawn? Are we supposed to be relying so heavily on our feelings? And if we rely on them so much when addressing the darker sides of life, why don't we trust them just as much when we walk away from an uplifting worship experience?

-s.

stef wrote:
: Are we supposed to be relying so heavily on our feelings?

I don't think anyone can say I am relying ONLY on my feelings here -- and I would say there is a big difference between saying "I felt bad" (which could mean just about anything, e.g. "I felt sad," "I felt angry," "I felt miserable," etc.) and saying "I felt dirty."

I didn't mean to single you out, Peter. I'm actively seeking out ways to work thru this issue in my own head/heart, and honestly wrestling with what the best approach is.

-s.

Incidentally ... Peter, what do you think of the Dogme movement as a whole? Though not a Dogme film I thought this tapped into the same aesthetic ...

twitch wrote:
: A Hole In My Heart swings WAY to the depraved end of the spectrum but though it
: gets as close to the line as humanly possible I never felt like it crossed into
: exploitation.

I was talking to my fiancée about this the other day, how we can sometimes justify allowing actors to commit acts that would be sinful in any other context for the sake of making a larger moral point, but we must always be aware that, at some point, the immorality committed by the cast and crew could very well overwhelm whatever moral point the film is trying to make. An oft-cited example of a justifiable real-life sin that is transformed into part of a larger moral point in film would be the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where Indiana (and thus Harrison Ford) takes the name of Jesus in vain, but then Indiana is slapped and scolded "for blasphemy". I'm fairly protective of the name of Jesus, but I could tolerate allowing an actor to say it gratuitously in a context like that because it would be impossible to make the larger moral point that such language is blasphemous WITHOUT the actor actually speaking the blasphemy. However, had the rest of the film continued to indulge in that kind of language, I don't think the scene with the moral point could have possibly outweighed what the actors were required to do. That's a deliberately trivial example, but I think it demonstrates the point that there is a certain murky calculus here, and it gets even more complicated when nudity and sex come into the picture -- and from where I sat, the actors in this film DID cross a certain line, in terms of how they degraded themselves, that outweighed whatever moral point the film might have had to make about the nature of degradation.

: Incidentally ... Peter, what do you think of the Dogme movement as a whole?
: Though not a Dogme film I thought this tapped into the same aesthetic ...

[ blink ] Really!? I didn't get a Dogme vibe off of this film at all.

FWIW, I'm a huge fan of The Celebration and a not-so-huge fan of a few other Dogme flicks. I think my second favorite film in that vein would be Minor Mishaps -- that particular film was NOT produced as a "Dogme" film, per se, but the director's NEXT film, In Your Hands (see the VIFF thread), IS a full-fledged "Dogme" film.

This is a short, but great thread. Thanks, Peter for your input.

FWIW, Mark Olsen of Film Comment at TIFF had an opposite reaction:


Sounds like going to a Noé, doesn't it? I am sure that some of this will fill your heart with sadness. When one of us sees it, it sounds like it would be as a priest, almost as an act of sacrifice.

-s.

I've seen two Moodysson films in the past two weeks and have much more hope for at least the intent behind something like Ett Hål i mitt Hjärta (love how that flows in Swedish) -- A Hole In my Heart. Moodysson greatly differs from a Breillat (the moral feminist perspective) or a Noé (the moral French perspective) in that there seems to be a direct plea to his audience to wake up to world issues and injustices that, even in our "rich society," as he calls it, we have sidestepped and failed to deal with. Show Me Love certainly deals with homosexuality and the hardship of youth who come out of the closet, but beyond that it shows us real kids, lost and confused, making stupid moves and being just plain mean to each other. And when you see it, you wish they'd just be a whole lot nicer, especially because their characters have come off so well that you know they can be nicer. They've had moments of tenderness, moments where you think that for just one second they stopped trying to manipulate their environment and approached life from a more mature standpoint. So you feel for them, you wish for something better, and maybe then there's the realization as a viewer then that the "betterness" has got to start with me. I think if a teen were to watch Show Me Love, they might understand that 1.) Adults and teens are not nearly as tolerant as everybody teaches, whether it's regarding a topic as strong as homosexulaity or something as lame as fashion trends -- kids in general are very quick to judge and attack, and 2.) There's nothing wrong with letting gentleness show through the tough-teen act. There's nothing wrong with searching out peace, even in hard situations.

The point being that this film would make anyone think about these things, if they bother to think at all.

I felt the same way after watching Lilja 4-ever. I wished I could do something about the injustice of Lilja's plight. She was such an innocent kid, at least in the beginning, and certainly not deserving of what happened to her. She almost learned how to manipulate her environment, only to be completely manipulated herself by wealthy individuals who knew how to take advantage of her innocence. I was amazed at how Moodysson showed most of this without much direct nudity, yet he still gave us, at least in one particular montage that lasted for a full minute or two, the most tension filled cinema that one can find. But again, I stress this -- this tension is not "tension for tension's sake," but for the sake of the harsh topic at hand and the point he wants to make about that topic. In Lilja, it's almost as if Moodysson is screaming out at us to find the people that do this and shut them down. And what a way to make his point.

The films cover topics that are tough to talk about, but Moodysson tackles them with his heart, wanting us to feel it pump. A Hole in my Heart, whether a misstep or not, must be Moodysson showing the excesses in order to, as Peter has said, get to the more moral point. After these two films I'm at least more in the corner of trusting him regarding A Hole in my Heart. That still doesn't mean that I'll see it though. But the Region 2 disc does come out next month.

-s.

This is just a brief snippet from www.lukasmoodysson.com of an interview he did with Amnesty International after the release of Lilja 4-ever. If anything, it at least shows where he desires to come from.



Also, a link to the older Tillsammans thread, and JRobert's review of that film.

-s.

One of the biggest problems I had with this film is that it toes the Dogme line without fully committing to it. So it plays itself off as this realistically untouched ironically emotional portrait of these four characters when it really is none of these. It isn't "real" in the Dogme sense because it makes full use of the flexibility of digital editing and manipulation. Even its sound has been crafted to fit a mood that Moodysson is trying to attain, a practice abhorrent to Dogme standards. It isn't "ironical" because there really isn't anything ironical anymore about pornographers, murderers, or other bad people having fractured personal histories and "feelings." Vivre sa vie and Boogie Nights do a much better job at this than Hole in My Heart anyway. It isn't truly "emotional" inasmuch as it is manufactured to elicit very specific emotions about its characters. I felt sorry for the son in the scenario not because of his sad history and placement in the narrative, but because he was irrevocably two-dimensional, doomed to that stereotyped flatness for the rest of his life. It isn't even really a portrait in the truest sense of the term. What Godard does with Nana in Vivre sa vie is a portrait, what Moodysson does here is something much less than this.

I have two more Moodysson's to watch. Show Me Love was a bit better than Hole in My Heart, but I am not expecting much from these other two. There was not one moment in Hole in My Heart that legitimized the film itself, it is even less than the sum of its parts.

(m) -

For what it's worth, Lilya 4-Ever is his best work to date, and it is miles above all else.

I did see A Hole in my Heart, several months ago, and didn't really respond because I didn't know how to respond after the viewing. I do think the film is trying to tittilate and gross us out at the same time. It is trying to use sex to sell itself to an audience and then show us how wrong the abuse of sex can be. But I'm not sure it's telling us anything more than what we'd easily figure out on our own.

-s.