To watch an avant-garde film is fraught with risk. At times one is rewarded with an imaginative masterpiece, other times one flinches at abominable failure. Alas, "Container" is of the latter kind.
An odd mixture of discordant grainy B&W images and an endless voice-over. Those two components rarely mesh. If feels like watching a muted film and listening to the soundtrack of another.
The imagery is a mixture of transvestism, bacchanals, mild S&M, fetishism, etc. It's not titillating. It is just there as a reminder of the human body as a flexible vehicle for expressing perversions.
The imagery did not bother me. The voice-over did. Spoken in the form of a supplicant whisper throughout, it is persistently irritating. And this before I comment on what is being said.
At first I thought this was a confessions-of-a-trans-gender, a long-winded whining about life's vicissitudes. Later it touches on a variety of subjects: Chernobyl, nihilist thoughts, suicidal musings, and religious drivel. Eventually it ceases to be an individualistic stream of consciousness and morphs into a rambling commentary about humans.
I stayed to the bitter end on account of the advertised promise by an admirer that the end would bring a twist. I felt angry to be duped. The last five minutes are as bad as the first five. Only the most die-hard avant-gardistes should waste their time with "Container".
An odd mixture of discordant grainy B&W images and an endless voice-over. Those two components rarely mesh. If feels like watching a muted film and listening to the soundtrack of another.
The imagery is a mixture of transvestism, bacchanals, mild S&M, fetishism, etc. It's not titillating. It is just there as a reminder of the human body as a flexible vehicle for expressing perversions.
The imagery did not bother me. The voice-over did. Spoken in the form of a supplicant whisper throughout, it is persistently irritating. And this before I comment on what is being said.
At first I thought this was a confessions-of-a-trans-gender, a long-winded whining about life's vicissitudes. Later it touches on a variety of subjects: Chernobyl, nihilist thoughts, suicidal musings, and religious drivel. Eventually it ceases to be an individualistic stream of consciousness and morphs into a rambling commentary about humans.
I stayed to the bitter end on account of the advertised promise by an admirer that the end would bring a twist. I felt angry to be duped. The last five minutes are as bad as the first five. Only the most die-hard avant-gardistes should waste their time with "Container".