Manuel de Layet [Film Festival 09.26.11] movie review interview thriller noir



Rating: 9/10

Another screening, another uppercut to my frontal lobe. What I usually review in these pages is entertainment, today it will a little different. Today it’s all about Art. My first idea about this year only attend to thing most fucked up things I could find in the festival leaflet has once again come into something wonderful. MEAT was as much a surprise as “The Oregonian”. It was slick, beautiful, and conveyed such intense meaning that I HAD to get an interview with the directors to talk about how they managed such a brilliant piece of work with so little of a budget.

More including the video interview after the break.


Victor and Maartje works have already been covered in our pages (Review of Meat, Review of Crepuscule) and I don't think I can add much on what as already been said.

This cinema isn't industry grade, it's crafted with patience, dedication and deep intuitive understating of what makes us tick inside. On this topic, the note I gave, is totally and utterly irrelevant and was just here to get your attention, this cinema operates beyond the inept exercise of grading.

So for the lazy ones who won't read the preceding reviews and are waiting for the video to load, here's the rundown:

Storywise it's a thriller about murder. A butcher is found dead naked on the floor of the shop he works in; the detective in charge of the case will slowly come to identify the victim and will be the worse for it.
T
hat, my dear and obstinate readers, is like saying the New Testament is the story of a hippie helping the poor. It leaves much out of the picture.

What the movie really is about is flesh, how it drives us and how we react to it. The age long antagonism, between a mind longing for death and flesh longing for carnal release. In both cases it's an instinctual urge. The flesh wants to perpetuate itself; everything with a sparkle of life in it will try to pass on the said sparkle.

Mind on the other hand is a biological incongruity, a few pounds of gristle that overdid its basic data collation tasks and started to try and reflect on its surroundings. Such mind will in its course reach the point where it sees itself as the aberration it is, and will long for death. This profound duality is what makes us humans. A crippled creature stuck between two states of being, no more an animal, not yet a god.

We can explain most of our daily psychosis that way, what not everyone is capable of doing is committing this to film with such elegance and taste.

And when I say elegance I mean it. The way it's shot makes the bleakest and grossest situations beautiful. It's not in every movie you'll see undinism shot with such sensuous, poetic and animal connotation. Like the evident marking of a territory and possession, all that being so natural you won't even notice what happened.

Now I can only urge you all to go see, not only this movie if it gets released in a theatre near you, but everything done by the directors.

I will myself patiently wait for their next project to bear into fruition.

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quietearth (9 years ago) Reply

Nice!

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