Rating: 4/5
— You're marrying a child — You're a man — A man? I don't know what that is
A man leads a blindfolded woman into the house he lived in as a child — a woman he intends to marry and one that bears more than a passing resemblance to his mother
While there, we fluidly transition from present to past and back with memories of growing up in the house with a mother dedicated to decadent sex parties and not much else. The only stern parenting he seems to receive is when his mother catches him masturbating while she tells him a bedtime story
His’s mother’s transparent dress that he hides underneath, the slip under which he slides his hand, the garter that he keeps to smell as he sucks his thumb; there is nothing subtle here, but the line between brazen and artless lives in the execution
The grandmother functions as a surrogate mother, teaching him to despise people but to leave something in tack to take from them — raising a boy who can never distinguish between tears and laughter
I appreciate the filmmaking and the boldness of the direction, but there are prolonged sequences of watching this guy revert to childlike impulses, and like his wife’s tired wandering the spectacle, we experience her tedium too
Still, lots of good stuff
Stray Thoughts
- Criterion calling this a “thriller” is a massive stretch
- I had to see the movie that made Shirley Temple resign from judging film festivals
- If you watched this with me, you would’ve heard me yell, “Paging Dr. Freud!” every three minutes
- It’s, unfortunately, a woman seeing a man she can fix and (spoiler alert) succeeding