Comment by Magic Marmalade:
A movie with a bad reputation, for all the wrong reasons.
One I've been meaning to see for some years, mainly to see what all the fuss was about. General, common cultural consciousness will hold this in a place of infamy due to proclaimed obscenity, and lately, a controversy over one of it's most infamous scenes, and the making of that scene. And while I find myself on that side of the fence where if I know something icky has happened on the set during the making of it, it colours my view of the movie as a whole, in this case, and quite in spite of myself, I come out the other side if this convinced it's a masterpiece.. as a movie, and as a piece of storytelling.
The story of a lost man who's wife has recently committed suicide, for reasons he can't understand, leaving him broken, confused, and kind of in freefall, meeting a much younger woman / girl in a flat, as she is looking for a place, and setting in motion almost instantly a questionable, and purely sexual relationship is, it seems, now that I have seen it, wholly misinterpreted, and the reputation it has for "obscene" scenes wildly over-exaggerated.
Admittedly, the opening scene of their meeting and first sexual encounter would surely be considered rape, as would the scene with the butter stick (I'll say nay more on that!), as well as the scene when she sticks her fingers up Brando's ass, but as with the shower scene in Psycho, it's more about what we know is going on, than what it actually shows...
(The girl is frequently nude, but only ,mostly from the waist up, and you only get the brief glimpse of Brando's flabby ass, but not in any sexual context)
In fact, the movie is deeper than that, and the sexual element is only a cipher for deeper meanings, concerning loss and tragedy, the broken-ness and desolation of a person when their world falls apart. A refuge, you might say, when nothing seems to matter any more.
It seems a bit shonky and third rate at the beginning, camera-work, directing, the whole shebang, but thoroughly engrossing as it goes along, and not for those sexual reasons.
The last half hour or so are positively brilliant, as, after a key scene where Brando visits, and has a stunning monologue at the bedside of the corpse of his dead wife, as she lies in state (Tom Cruise's best performance in Magnolia is a straight lift of this scene) , the tone suddenly lifts, like he's got something off his shoulders, and it becomes quite a charismatic affair, full of life and zest, even optimism...
...For him, at least.
And having raised you up in such a way, it abruptly drops you emotionally down a metaphorical elevator shaft right at the end.
Seriously, I don't think a creeping grin has dropped so suddenly from my face in any movie.
breathtakingly tragic.
You can feel the influence of this movie in many modern movies, like Blue Is The Warmest Colour, and one scene is shot where (Now) Elliot Page's dream architect does that thing with the mirrors under the viaduct in Inception (I bet Nolan just wanted to film there because of the aesthetic from this).
So if you can get over the reputation and disturbing elements of the movie's production, you have a brilliant move here.
