![]() ![]() The old man’s phone call to his daughter and Maximilian’s phone calls to his mother somehow suggest distance and isolation rather than the warmth of communication. When one has nothing, one still has one’s pride. I love how he is often bellicose and challenging: the begging seems less about money and more about demanding to be noticed. When the Romanian boy starts begging, it seems almost performative, a piece of street theatre. And Maximilian will be n(N)oticed after the spree at the bank is reported on the televisions (that are ubiquitous throughout the film). But on the other, the Romanian boy is noticed (by the foster parents) once he has appeared on the news. The news sections give us a backdrop of a world filled with violence and pain: is this a metonymic relationship between the small pains of the individual and the national or global pains of world events? On the one hand, it feels like the news stories are background events, largely ignored and too big to comprehend. A perfect visual metaphor for a relentless monotony that is both gruelling and inescapable. The anguished face: it’s almost unbearable to watch - nothing less than a form of torture. The Ping-pong training scene is just awesome and unforgettable. The Romanian boy and the Foster girl are both seen wearing ostentatious red coats: one is stolen one is given as a gift. I don’t know the theory too well, but I imagine it could be interesting to view the film through a Maslow lens: the need for companionship, for love, for spirituality. I was reminded, of course, of Maslow’s pyramid of needs. Even in his destitute state, he needs to find ways to fill the days and counter the boredom and ennui of living. We see the Romanian boy firstly meeting his basic needs of food (from a bin) and warmth (steals the coat), and then once he’s settled in the shelter of the station, we see him stealing a magazine and a camera. Did he buy the gun with plans of suicide? Or with plans to take revenge on the perpetrator (possibly his father - who is absent from the phone calls or possibly the ping-pong coach)? I may be straying too far from the film’s content here, but it’s interesting to me to speculate. And though it may seem a little too simplistic, it’s hard to avoid the suggestion that Maximilian may have been a victim of child abuse. The news footage of Michael Jackson defending himself against claims of child molestation is not only repeated, but is also the final image of the film. I’m not sure exactly what this attitude towards the weapon might mean…Ĭhild abuse. ![]() Chance indeed! It’s also interesting how relaxed his friends seem to be about his having a gun - see also the way a pal hands the gun over to him in a carrier bag at the college cafeteria. If Maximilian had lost the game of Mikado then he would have lost the bet and consequently forfeited his handgun, and then the spree couldn’t have happened. If you watched the film without knowing who had a gun (and without the opening text that explicitly tells us), would it be easy to guess which character is going to be responsible for a violent rampage? Is death really any worse than the miserable quotidian alienation of life at the end of the twentieth century? Bleak! The lives of the characters are all so sad, lonely and depressing that you could perhaps think that their murders were not so much of a tragedy and they’ve actually been put out of their misery. The pops of red that spatter the mostly grey and muted colour scheme, no doubt suggestive of the violence to come, reminded me of the use of red in Claude Chabrol’s film Le Boucher. ![]()
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