Marie Antoinette

 Sofia Coppola's 2016 Marie Antoinette, notwithstanding its gorgeous regalia, period settings, and stunning tableaux (called typical "Hollywood sauce" by Le Figaro) is, in fact, a high-concept variant on the bio-pic, as rigorous and strict in its ideology as a play by Brecht.  Fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette lives in a Vienna palace longer than a football-field.  She has been married-off to the Dauphin of France, a feckless chap who, later, becomes the equally hapless Louis XVI.  The notion is that this royal marriage will cement the relationship of alliance between the two Catholic powers, France and Austria.  Marie conveyed by carriage, with a couple of ladies-in-waiting to the French border, where she is unloaded, stripped naked, and, then, clad in French finery -- no one in France wants the future Queen to be seen wearing an Austrian gown.  At Versailles, she is expeditiously married to the Dauphin, a eccentric young man whose only passion seems to be the study of the history of keys and key-making.  The Dauphin rides out with his hounds and an entourage of 30 huntsmen every morning and, except for some stilted dinners, has nothing to do with his bride.  At night, he is sexually indifferent to the young woman and, for her part, she seems pretty unenthusiastic about the prospect of producing heirs for the Kingdom of France.  Years pass and no child is born to the couple.  At last, Marie's brother comes to Court and explains to the King (Louis the 15th having died of smallpox) that having sex is like inserting your key into a lock.  This does the trick with the King and he conceives four children with Marie Antoinette, including two sons who are heirs to the throne.  Marie has an affair with a handsome Swedish officer named Fersen.  But he returns to his martial duties. (The affair is wholly inconsequential and the liaison goes nowhere.)  Louis XVI has been persuaded to support the American rebels to spite France's ancestral enemy, Britain.  These expenses bankrupt the realm and lead to unrest.  Marie Antoinette, who has spent lavishly on gambling and shoes, is blamed for the country's economic woes and is labeled "Madame Deficit."  There's an uprising and angry rebels surround the palace.  Marie with her children are spirited out of the palace at Versaille.  The last shot shows the wreckage of her bedroom at Versaille after her flight at dawn.  Mercifully, the film doesn't show us anything of the fate that later befell Marie or the ravages of the French Revolution.

Kirsten Dunst is very good as the child-bride and, later, Queen of France.  She has unassuming habits and would rather play with her lap dogs and children at the pastoral Petit Trianon built for her by the King.  She chattily says "hello" to everyone at the Royal Court (something that is not done) and applauds enthusiastically at the opera, also a breach of etiquette.  Her social trajectory is plotted by her applause at operas -- the first time she does this everyone is aghast but, gradually, courtesy requires that the entire audience join her in her applause.  Later, when she applauds spontaneously, near the end of the movie, she has fallen prey to the intrigues at the court and no one at all, follows her example.

The film is odd and static.  For 2/3ds of the movie, Marie doesn't have sex with the Dauphin and, later, the King.  (The King is played with remote indifference by Jason Schwartzman, an example of the film's eccentric casting.  Schwartzman's part is underwritten to the point of non-existence, but this is intentional, part of the film's design. Other people in the movie are SNL's Molly Shannon, Rip Torn, Marianne Faithfull and Steve Coogan.)  Most of the movie is about people demanding that Marie copulate with her husband and this not being accomplished.  Once, the King figures out what is required of him to do his duty, he performs in an acceptable manner and, in fact, sires four children, one of whom dies.  But by the time, an heir is born, the film's plan requires that the jig be up for the royals and the movie accelerates rapidly toward its ending.  For the languorous first 2/3rds of the movie, the film shows us various aspects of royal intrigue, including rivalry between the disreputable Madame DuBarry, the old King's mistress and the relatively innocent, if also catty, Marie.  (DuBarry is played by the horror actress Asia Argento and she is suitably venal and cruel.)  Nothing much happens for most of the movie -- the high point is a party after which Marie and some of her cohorts stay awake to greet the dawn, a lyrical sequence that is referenced, at least visually, by the concluding scenes in the film when Marie with the King and her children flee Versailles, also in the cold, indifferent light of dawn.  The viewer, at first, waits anxiously for something to happen.  But nothing happens at all and, as I watched this movie, after the midpoint, I was rooting for Coppola and company to maintain their weird integrity and eschew any kind of dramatic conflict, political intrigue, or other staples of the standard bio-pic -- and, true to her rather austere version of the narrative, Coppola sticks to her premises.  The ending of the movie is underplayed and as inconsequential as everything that preceded it.  Marie's entire life is lived inside of a bubble of aristocratic and royal privilege -- we are never given so much as a glance at what life is like outside of the gilded halls and mirrored corridors of Versailles (and before the palace in Vienna).  Marie literally has no contact with anyone but servants, sycophantic court ladies, other royals, and her children.  The makes the scenes of her pretending to be a milkmaid at Petit Trianon and petting her goats and sheep particularly pathetic.  The cataclysm that sweeps her away seems to have no real motive and there is no sense of politics or political reality (beyond court intrigue) in the movie.  The disaster that will sweep Marie away is unseen, unexpected, and leaves her baffled.  

The movie is luminously shot with a palette that suggests Watteau.  The soundtrack is as eccentric as the casting -- the music is upbeat pop tunes from the eighties, songs by New Order, The Cure, Siouxsie and Banshees and others, including Bow Wow Wow's cut of "I want Candy" and a transcendentally weird version of "Fools rush in (where angels fear to tread)".  The movie features lots of shots of royal bling, closeups of jewels (huge emeralds and sapphires and diamonds), thousands of high-fashion shoes, and every possible variety of lusciously textured gown and lingerie.  Food is filmed in mouthwatering close-ups, mostly elaborate pastries and macaroons with other treats engineered with complicated culinary art.  But despite all the lavish attention paid to costumes, enormous wigs and hairdos, jewelry, and lavish banquets, the film's splendor conceals an iron fist.  Coppola, in her way, is just as rigorous as Roberto Rossellini in his The Taking of Power of Louis XIV -- the movie is about how power is exercised at a royal court and how the accoutrements of royal power isolate and imprison those who must live by them.  Marie never meets a peasant -- hell, she never even meets a financier or representative of the bourgeois class; she is completely isolated from anything approaching real life and doomed accordingly.

Marie Antoinette is demanding.  It's scrupulous plotting of its non-plot and its non-narrative is boring and claustrophobic. But boredom is the point of the film and I think the picture has been largely misunderstood.  In the opening shot, we see Marie sprawled like a candied confection (she is pale as vanilla) on a chaise lounge; with her fingers she picks at a four-or-five-layer cake next to where she reclines.  This is the image of Marie Antoinette that has come down to us through history.  The film doesn't really deny the reality of this image but, rather, explains how luxury and noble privilege can be a prison every bit as confining as the Bastille.

An Evening of Bharatnatyam (Ragamala Dance)

 These are ignorant notes on an art form that I don't understand.  Here, I describe the performance that I witnessed on October 24, 2026 at the Paramount Theater in Austin, Minnesota (as distinguished from the Paramount Theater in Austin, Texas where the comedian Janeann Garafalo was performing last night).  Beyond description, there isn't much I can say.  Description has its merits -- we would all profit from an intelligent alien life form describing our appearance and behavior and folkways to us.  Sometimes, looking at things from the stance of the outsider is helpful, although, of course, problematic.  It's bracing to encounter something wholly new and, perhaps, this encounter frees one from the burden of critical responsibility, an aspect of writing that is always daunting.  I don't have to worry about doing justice to this dance performance because I grasp so little of it.

The Ragamala company, as it appeared in Austin, consists of six dancers.  They performed eight pieces each between 6 and ten minutes long. The form of dance derives from practice in south India. The first four pieces, perhaps, were dedicated to the Hindu deity, Krishna.  The last three pieces consisted of a three-movement suite honoring Shiva.  On the basis of old movies, I came to the program expecting the dance to consist of sinuous, serpentine movements, the choreography of a King Cobra advancing on its prey (cf. Fritz Lang's The Tiger of Eschnapur), in other words, an undulant practice, perhaps, like belly-dancing.  In fact, the dance is rigidly hieratic with the torsos of the dancers forming the core of rectilinear gestures and movements.  In effect, this dance seems to animate a square or rectangle with all gestures oriented toward defining the outer edges of the imaginary cubic form occupied by the dancer.  Hands and arms extend rigorously at right angles from the body, the hands often hyper-extended at right angles to define the square or cube in which the motion occurs.  Another rectilinear movement is a squat in which the legs form an implied square base to the body -- you can't really see the legs clearly except for the calves, wrapped in tinkling bell anklets, and the feet that stomp emphatically on the stage; otherwise the motion of hips and groin is covered by a sort of silk apron that the dancers wear. (The dancers wore identical but differently colored costumes consisting of a harem-style blouse and harem pants with a fan-like apron extending below the waist; on their heads, the dancers seemed to have skullcaps that were themselves crowned by white diadems.) To me the dancing seemed archaic, suggestive of the motions implied by the rectilinear forms of moving figures inscribed on the walls of Egyptian temples.  An apophatic description may be best -- that is, a description on the basis of what the choreography was not like:  this is certainly not a form of folk dance, the motions are too robotic and rigidly defined for folk dance; indeed, the dancers move with a martial precision -- they walk with their backs absolutely rigid, shoulders thrown back, with a military bearing as if on parade.  There is no resemblance to classical ballet -- the ensemble in Ragamala moves mostly in unison, although sometimes a soloist is featured in the foreground of a group of four dancers.  There are no lifts, no leaps, and no carries; the dancers never touch one another at all -- thus, there is none of the drooping and falling and catching motions that you might see in modern dance like that of Pina Bausch.  There is nothing erotic about the dance, even though the subject might, in fact, be eros -- an friend of Indian background said that one of the dances portrayed the Gopis (or milkmaids) vying to seduce Lord Krishna.  Everything is intensely dignified, de-eroticized and expressive only within a limited repertoire of motions and gestures.  (At times, the most expressive aspect of the dance was the eyes of the dancers, sweeping back and forth but without turning their heads which remained rigidly immobile.)  The effect is courtly -- this seems to be a refined form of dance developed for some kind of royal court and, sometimes, the movements reminded me of baroque dances that I have seen in operas staged in period style.  The de-eroticized bodies move in a declamatory fashion as if they are pronouncing certain decrees or geometric axioms/.  There is no shimmying, wiggling of hips or backside, or anything burlesque about any aspect of this dance.  It is highly dignified in form and gesture.  The only time there is any variation from the right-angle moves of the dancers is when a diagonal is inscribed by hands in the air, a sort of choreographed Pythagorean theorem.  

Evidently, this form of dance represents a living tradition.  The second half of the show featured "Sacred Earth", a dance choreographed when two practitioners (both named Ramaswamy) were in residence with the company in 2012.  Sacred Earth begins with a devotional solo that seems supplicatory to Shiva.  In the second piece, daily activities are depicted in stylized dance movements -- these include gestures that signify planting and picking rice as well as other quotidian activities.  At one point, rather thrilling, I thought, a dancer representing a deer gallops across the stage, an exception to the rule that dancers generally don't leap or lunge.  The elements are represented by various hand motions, a fluttering gesture that signifies air and water, including a Tai Chih-like figure as if the dancer were unscrolling some length of parchment or silk (this means "Ganges").  Fire is a bird-like fluttering in front of the chest.  Hindus imagine the world configured by five elements, not the classical four identified in the West -- the fifth element is "ether" marked by an appropriately "etherial" gesture of the hands waving over the head.  The last dance seemed to be a hymnic blessing to Lord Shiva including an actual sung or chanted section that is a prayer.  In this dance, the performers sometimes replicated famous images of Shiva dancing with his many arms extended as a halo or mandorla about his body, his foot crushing the dwarf of the material world, and the other leg bent at the knee and extended to the side.  The music in general was highly percussive with repetitive plaintive singing above a seismic drone.  In the final suite of "Sacred Earth", the vocal part featured singing of a kind that I have never heard before -- that is, the singer vocalizing "d" sounds, but triple tonguing them so that the staccato enunciations are like rapid-fire clicks, a precise replication of the very fast d-d-d-d-drumming accompanying the piece.

I'm glad that I saw this show.  It was relatively short and quite literally entrancing.  You walk out into the night with a feeling that your senses have been revivified, made active, and receptive. This is what performing arts, at their best, can accomplish.    

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

 The hype surrounding Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026, Jane Schoenbrun) is justified.  The movie is thought-provoking and entertaining.  It's a thesis film, that is, a declaration of theoretical principles. None of this is occult -- the movie announces itself as an application of "queer theory" to a disreputable genre of film, that is, the "sleepaway camp" slasher movie.  In these pictures, a group of good-looking and horny teens are stalked by a mad killer at an isolated summer camp.  While engaging in sex, or the prelude to sex, the lecherous kids are slaughtered.  In the end, a final girl, often one who is chaste and has not participated in the erotic free-for-all, confronts the monstrous serial murderer.  After a gory battle, the final girl survives, although the monster, representing forces in the Id that are immortal and inextinguishable, limps away to fight another day -- thus, authorizing an indefinite number of sequels if the specific formula is successful at the box-office.  

Teenage Sex is overtly didactic.  In effect, it's a lecture in theory with gruesome illustrations, a sort of slasher-movie slide lecture.  Blood spurts in geysers that are 30 feet high, heads literally role, and people are hacked and impaled to the point that the camera lens is so splashed with gore that the images are reduced to Mark Rothko-style fields of red.  Here are the propositions that all this mayhem declares:  (1) Monsters are created when sexuality is repressed; (2) Repressed sexuality erupts into violence and lurid carnage (blood spurts volcanically out of bisected bodies and severed necks); (3) Movies, specifically horror films exploit sexual repression by showing us the "return of the repressed"; (4) Murder in slasher-movies involving "nubile" (the word is used in the film) teenagers, represents a fear of being sexually penetrated; (5) Geysers of blood signify sexual release or orgasm; (6) The visual dynamic of films of this genre involve voyeurism, peeping at bodies through occluded fields of vision (generally supported by heavy breathing on the soundtracks); (7) Horror movies are about "desire and fluids" -- this is stated directly by a main character in the film played by Gillian Anderson; (8) The dynamic of pleasure involves both seeing covertly and desiring to be seen; expressed in other words, sexual pleasure requires that one desire to penetrate the beloved as well as wish to be penetrated; (9) In sexual intercourse, the distinction between subject and object is blurred and becomes irrelevant; (10) One achieves orgasm by inducing the state of mind that one is both active (an agent) and passive (a submissive victim) in the act of love.  -- Much of this is questionable but it makes sense in the context of the movie.  In summary, the film's theoretical underpinnings sound a bit dry -- however, the movie is moist, even wet to the pont of gushing.  If we trace the way that gender is customarily expressed in our culture, the male principle is thought to be active and opposed to the passive female.  Teenage Sex dramatizes the proposition that orgasm can't be attained without the bisexual principle of being, at once, active and passive, that is, predator and prey at the same time or, even more radically, one that imagines that he or she is raping by being raped.  

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a feted lesbian or bisexual filmmaker. She is obviously a surrogate for the director Janet Schoenbrun whose previous well-reviewed movies involve psycho-sexual elements.  The formative experience in Kris' sexual life was watching the first of the series of Camp Miasma movies (it is a "franchise" boasting no fewer than eight pictures) when she was eight or nine.  Playing the DVD in the middle of the night, the little girl is fascinated by the look in the eyes of the final girl when she climaxes just before her boyfriend, who is atop her, is impaled.  Kris wants to produce the re-boot of the Camp Miasma movies consistent with "Queer Movie Theory" and, further, intends to cast the "final girl" who is now a 60 year old woman in the picture.  She goes to upstate Washington, near the Canadian border, where she locates the actress, now a recluse living "off the grid" in the deep mountain forest.  The "final girl," Billy has grown into Gillian Anderson who is stately, beautiful, and sinister; she speaks with a heavy southern accent a bit like the detective in the "Knifes Out" pictures.  Billy is living in the location and compound of Camp Tivoli, a sleepaway camp that was used as the set for Camp Miasma in the first film.  After the success of the first movie, Billy has retired and not been seen on screen for thirty years.  (At the time of the movie, she says that she was 24 playing 17.)  Billy is described as eccentric and mysterious, like the figure played by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.  Kris drives to the camp, gets her SUV stuck in the snow, and hikes the rest of the way to the compound where Billy is living alone, but with a "cinema" next to her cabin.  Anderson as Billy makes a grand entrance just at the moment when Kris says to herself "this is where I expect a jump-scare" -- she is dressed like a femme fatale in a fifties' noir wearing an extravagant broad-brimmed hat.  The camp is filmed as a movie set with fake snow and mountainous landscape obviously painted on flats around the buildings.  Kris importunes Billy to agree to appear in the re-boot.  Billy resists but there is a sexual charge about their encounter which involves eating Kentucky Fried Chicken (filmed in lavish sexulaized close-ups like the famous eating scene in Tom Jones) and smoking a big marijuana spliff.  Gradually, a romance blossoms between the two women.  Kris admits that she can't achieve orgasm and that she feels remote from her own body.  The two women go into the "cinema" or screening shack to watch the old movie.  In the middle of the screening, the power goes out.  Candles are lit and there is a tentative sexual encounter that is aborted when Kris can't respond to Billy's caresses.  

The killer in the Miasma series of films is called "Little Death", of course, the French euphemism for orgasm.  "Little Death" is a burlesque figure.  He's a scrawny guy who runs around with his face hidden behind a metal ventilator duct, a reference, I think, to the voyeuristic aspect of teenage slasher movies -- someone is always peeping at the teenagers through underbrush or hiding in the HVAC vents. Little Death comes out of the center of the lake next to the camp.  He is immortal and rises from the water like the Lady of the Lake in John Boorman's Excalibur wielding a long razor-sharp spear.  The spear seems to have magical properties -- if it touches you, your flesh explodes into geysers of blood.  The sex between the women has a activated Little Death.  It turns out that the lake has a hole in its bottom and Little Death lives in marginally furnished room, naked and with some moldering furniture and a big flat screen TV -- it's a set smuggled in from Twin Peaks.  The hole in the lake, which is portrayed as a ray of light extending up through the turbid water, is said to be the place where movies come from.  Little Death emerges from the lake and slaughters Kris' vulgar and condescending producers who have appeared for a one minute cameo at the camp before being dissolved into explosions of gore.  Kris' girlfriend and her bisexual partner, Thor, also both comical figures, have made the trip as well from LA to the camp and are wiped out after another 20 seconds.  (These scenes, and much of the snowy ambience of the film, are related to Kubrick's The Shining, particularly the scene where a man with clairvoyant abilities travels with great difficulty to the Overlook Hotel and, then, is axed out of the picture in less than a minute of screen-time.  Teenage Sex's structure also harkens to the Kubrick horror movie -- the episodes are labeled "Monday," "Tuesday" and so on.)  The murders excite the two women and they have sex amidst rose petals and candles.  Little Death appears and impales Billy. Billy vomits about six gallons of blood all over Kris who, finally, achieves a full-blown orgasm in this arduous manner.  The next morning both women wake up, none the worse for wear but covered from head to toe with dried gore.  They go into town and buy some candies and chips to fuel their ardent sexual affair.  Some children are playing with squirt guns and none of the townspeople seem to notice that both women are painted red from head to toe.. Little Death is gone for the moment, but, of course, will arise from his underwater lair again.  In one scene, Kris says that it's her fantasy to be the "final girl" half-naked and fleeing Little Death with her "tits bouncing" as she runs.  We get to see Kris running in slow motion with her breasts flopping up and down, wearing panties and a transparent tee-shirt just before the sex scene with Billy.  In that scene, Kris confesses that she wants to be the victim of penetration by Little Death, a desire that the film fulfills -- although without fatal consequence, since as Billy says, "it's all play."

The movie is a wonky mash-up of teenage slasher movies, Kubrick, and David Lynch with elements of David Cronenberg as well -- for instance, Little Death plays DVDS in his lair by pushing them into a vaginal-shaped slit, a bit like the belly DVD player in Videodrome.  Some of the music and the Pacific Northwest setting invoke both Lynch's Twin Peaks and his Blue Velvet which as a similar psycho-sexual and sado-masochistic theme.  The film is something to behold and driven by the fiercely committed performances of Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder.  It's often very funny and I recommend it without reservation.  

My Sad Dead

 My Sad Dead, a 2026 supernatural mini-series shot in Buenos Aires, is an excellent illustration of something that streaming services do very well. A program of this sort, made cheaply but with great panache, allows the director to experiment with material that might not be viable as a feature film.  Another example of this sort of mini-series are the three seasons of Paolo Sorrentino's The Young Pope, an extraordinary program that, in terms of its length and sophistication, would not be possible in any other form.  Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie's remarkable The Curse, similarly, is an innovative program that probably couldn't have been made except for streaming or cable TV.  It's my contention that if Alejandro Innaritu's Digger had been released on cable or streaming, the show would have been greeted with rapturous acclaim and accorded universal plaudits.  As it is, the stench of commercial failure around Digger taints the air in the theater and puts both the Mexican master-director and poor Tom Cruise in a bad odor.  My Sad Dead, directed and written by the great Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain, is an example of a production that would not be commercially viable in movie theaters despite the show's manifest excellence -- the risk of failure, however, doesn't hover this four-part mini-series, about 200 minutes long, since Netflix has paid for the film and doesn't require an exorbitant box-office to make the venture profitable.  

Ema is a capable but disgraced doctor working in a large and chaotic Buenos Aires hospital.  She's rumored to have triaged viable COVID patients by diverting resources from the dying to those with a chance of living. (Ema seems harried and has a prickly personality; she is like the great character actress Thelma Ritter from Pickup on Sixth Street. From her earliest childhood, Ema has, to use the parlance of The Sixth Sense, seen dead people.  The dead wail and howl and moan in this movie, a sonic backdrop like the unsettling sounds that we hear in The Zone of Interest.  Mostly the dead are inconsolable, but Ema, in her own way (as with her COVID patients) tries to help those who can be reached -- she gently guides them to places that they can haunt without being overly intrusive and, in fact, helpful to the living. In the opening scene, we see Ema's elderly mother Susanna dying in agony.  It's a family trait that Ema and Susanna and her daughter, Cora, can't tolerate morphine.  The horrible pain afflicting Ema's mother has caused her to scream to the point that she has destroyed her vocal cords -- and then, she screams without vocal cords.  Death doesn't help much.  She still sits around Ema's house morosely, moaning and weeping in a high-pitched, child's voice.  

Emas's daughter, Cora, is a photographer.  She is involved in filming some kind of a music video (she is taking still shots) in a very bad neighborhood a few blocks from where Ema lives.  The neighborhood is what we would call in the States, "the projects" and it's rife with hip hop and crime.  Into this milieu comes Tomas and Lila with their enormously fat daughter Julie.  Lila is Ema's sister who lives in Portland, Oregon and she's practical, self-absorbed, and doesn't see dead people.  Julie, who is huge and bloated, is about 24 and wears a red football jersey with the letter 12 on it, marked "Namath."  Julie is miserable and mentally ill.  She has been hospitalized many times without any real benefit as to her schizophrenia.  Julie is a nuisance because she has noisy sex nightly for hours at a time with apparitions that she calls her "friends".  It's not clear whether these apparitions are purely imaginary or, perhaps, the ghosts of the dead, because, like Ema, she can see her "triste muertos" ("the sad dead").  There's a big hexagonal shaped water-tower built above the block of condominiums where Ema lives.  After attending a neighborhood meeting of some kind with Julie, Ema mentions something to the obese girl about the water tower.  So, in a driving rainstorm, Julie climbs up onto the top of building, hoists herself up a ladder, and, then, hurls her body face-first into the murky reservoir in the tower.  Some criminals gun down three pretty girls who are shopping for clothing with money given them by Cora for posing for pictures for her.  (In a way, Cora is indirectly responsible for the death of the girls -- in this film, everyone is sort of indirectly responsible for everyone else's misery.)  We, then, see the enormous Julie having vigorous sex with three or four apparitions, who may include the girls shot down for the money Cora gave them.  (This remarkable sequence occurs before Julie drowns herself in the water tower.)

No one knows where Julie has gone.  Ultimately Lila and Tomas return to Portland.  Ema wanders the streets, shot in languorous long tracking scenes, looking in a desultory way for Julie.  The streets are filled with choruses of howling dead; the sound track quivers with dolorous strings and wailing ghosts.  Cora can now see the dead a little bit and she chats with her taciturn dead grandmother.  In an alley, she goes to the place where her lover died from a heroin overdose and sits with her head on the ghost's lap.  Up in the water tower, Julie is rotting -- skin flakes off her face and feet and fills the reservoir with lacy bits of decomposing flesh.  The corpse-juice in the water, apparently, affects anyone who drinks it and slowly more and more people can see ghosts.  Ema figures out that Julie is rotting in the water tower, verifies that she is floating there, now sentient as a ghost.  Lila and Tomas return to look for Julie.  Ema reports that there is a corpse rotting in the communities' water, but this being Buenos Aires, no one really does anything for several weeks.  Tomas sings John Denver's song "Country Roads" in the shower.  Later, in a bravura tour-de-force, the camera tracks in circles as a crowd of ambulances, fire trucks and emergency workers convene on the water tower to hoist Julies' rotting body out of the reservoir -- these images are scored to John Denver's pop song. (A similar sequence occurs in the fourth episode scored to a perky pop tune by Shakira.) There's no resolution to any of the subplots, many of which I haven't mentioned.  Julie reappears as a ghost and continues to have sex with her "friends" whom she thought had abandoned her -- hence, the suicide in the water tower.  Susanna, Ema's old mother, seems reconciled to being dead and her pain has lessened -- she now sits placidly at the dinner table with Ema and Cora who has moved in with them.  After a particularly vigorous bout of group sex, Julie also sits at the dinner table, smiling shyly and contentedly, as she watches the two living women eat their supper.  Larrain provides a shot of elephantine Julie completely nude, facing the camera like some sort of prehistoric fertility goddess.   It's unclear whether the final scene at the dinner table is a vision of Hell or a glimpse of some sort of perverse heaven.

The tone of the film is assured, morbid, and elliptical.  The picture is shot on overexposed film so that everything is pale, ghostlike, and seems bleached-out.  Larrain blurs the faces of the dead so that with their open screaming mouths they look like paintings by Francis Bacon -- particularly the artist's "Screaming Pope (after Velasquez)".  In longer shots, the dead are everywhere, sitting half-naked on park benches or staggering down hospital or bureaucratic corridors.  The movie has many shots that simply track Ema as she wanders about the mean streets -- there are as many moving shots of this kind as there are images of Jimmy Stewart driving his car in Vertigo, a movie that has some of the same ambience of My Sad Dead.  The film has something to do with grief, particularly the grief of those mourning the "disappeared" like Julie.  Julie's corpse taints the whole community and, briefly, causes everyone to see horrifying visions and apparitions.  But, at the end, things seem to have returned to some sort of macabre normality.  This is a remarkable movie, very bold with respect to its slow pace and unattractive, if realistic, bodies and faces.  Pablo Larrain is a great filmmaker and, although I don't exactly understand, My Sad Dead, I admire it greatly.