Featured Movies
Partners
Pretentious
A deeply flawed exercise is style over content - or rather, style over competent story telling.
The central premise, that the Nazi's methods of processing human beings and the language they employed in doing so is comparable to contemporary corporations attitudes to their workforce, is potentially insulting both to the descendents of the Nazi's victims and to modern industry. Perhaps this explosive subject was handled more delicately in the book on which the film is based - and it is a film that seems very obviously based on a book. Mathieu Amalric, so good elsewhere, is here miscast as Simon; essentially a passive / observer character about whom we learn very little, but through whose eyes we must experience the entire narrative. Such a role requires an actor who can command our sympathy instantly; Amalric with his fixed startled mask of a face fails to do this. The result is we never really care about what happens to Simon; a fatal flaw. In addition, so determined is the director to dazzle us with style (and this style does hold the attention for around 30 minutes), that any attempt to create a realistic corporate environment is abandoned in favour of gorgeously uniformly colourless costume, no apparent sign of anyone doing any actual work, not to mention the frankly bizarre sight of suited 30something business men dancing around at grotty underground raves. Initially enjoyable, this lack of realism would not be a problem if the film did not proceed in asking us to engage with entirely real issues such as the holocaust and market economy de-humanisation. The more we tire of its glossy facade, the more we experience this film as irritating, tedious, mannered, and very very pretentious. It wants to be Haneke - it's not. |
