Carnage (2002)

. . . and giggles at tragedy on TV *and* real-life. Teenage bullfighter is balletic/transcendent/razor-sharp in his suit of lights and dance of death.I speculate a movie focusing on the these two immediately-engaging characters and their possible serendipitous intersection would fascinate.The bullfighter and his arcane ritualistic world of lean and hungry boys are beautifully introduced -- cinematic poetry -- and his opera-buffa older male relatives are superb. A prodigious little girl on Valium and her protective Great Dane, in a world of adults who don't quite get her -- this is a great idea worth developing.But this film gets scattered -- sacrificed on the altar of 'high-concept' -- i.e., following the pieces of a butchered fighting bull as they make their ways to various dysfunctional human groupings around Europe. And all at a languorous, Arty pace. This would be better in the antic tone of a John Waters or Pedro Almodóvar movie. If lingering shots on irrelevant objects and prolonged non-informing close-ups are your thing, enjoy. Even at two hours-ten minutes, the film-maker has not taken time to develop the characters to the point that we care about them. It doesn't help that the film jumps around story-to-story, dissolving any dramatic tension. One's attention span (perhaps along with one's goodwill) rebels at the feeling it's being abused.Not to say the actors aren't lovely, the photography not exquisite, the ideas not good -- they are, are, are. But films like this make me -- quite irrationally -- long for an ideal version of the tyranny of the old studio system, where somebody would intervene on behalf of the audience. Still I give it a ten because I sense the film is sincere, and its original ideas are very original indeed.

"Carnage" is a foreign contribution to the many recent films which explore the lives of people with some interconnectedness. In "It's the Rage" the common denominator was the hand gun. In "Magnolia", it was a game show. In "Five Senses", it was a human sense. In "Carnage", it's part of a bull. Killed in a bullfight, a 1000 pound beast makes it's way to a rendering plant where it's dissected. A handful of characters in the film eventually acquire part of the bull while we voyeuristically watch their plebeian lives as they trudge from day to day and, we're supposed to believe, are affected by the bull. Well, this flick is just so much bull and, in spite of some positive critical commentary, just doesn't work. The film is a solid production which bombs on it's ridiculous story making for a slick but boring watch which seems to be building but in the end just fizzles. With subtitles and a 2 hour duration, "Carnage" isn't worth the time or effort. (C+)

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERSCARNAGE is a bad film made by an untalented director. Still some people strongly liked this film. It was very controversial when shown in Cannes.Viewers either loved it or hated it. I hated it.Carnages begins with a toreador getting dressed (etc.). Instant Chekhov- if you show a toreador getting dressed then you will see him, sooner or later, getting gored and carried out of the arena feet first. This time it was very much sooner.Different story- a schoolteacher in Lille is worried because one of her students, a 5 year old girl, draws pictures in which the animals are bigger than the people. Teacher flies off to be with her parents in Spain. The little girl is subject to epileptic seizures and lives with a giant Great Dane. She is watching a bull fight on television when she sees the toreador being gored and carried out of the ring. The teacher arrives and is met at the airport by her mother who drives her home, partially following the truck bearing the bull's carcass.The bull is cut up with the eyes going to a hospital researcher in Brussels. He finds that the bull was blind in one eye and brings the eyes home with him. His wife is very pregnant.An Italian actress who has been been auditioning and working at small jobs in Lille attends sensitivity classes which take place in the nude in a municipal swimming pool featuring people you wouldn't want to see naked except the actress, who is played by Chiaria Mastroianni, who, having been born really, really rich, doesn't have to show her breasts in movies. She gets a job, in costume, at the local hypermarche selling meat from Spain. She sells a huge bone marked Romeo (the name of the recently deceased bull) to the family with the epileptic daughter and the Great Dane. While loading their car their shopping cart goes astray and hits the actress's wreck of a car. This is witnessed by a suicidal ice skater/philosopher who waits until the actress comes out of the shop to tell her he saw who did it. He knows their name and address from a bottle of Valium left at the scene.The actress and the ice skater confront the family just as they give the bone to the dog which goes into immediate convulsions and dies. Meanwhile the researcher with the pregnant wife for some reason agrees to look after a neighbors bratty kid. Soon he is in the fridge playing with the bulls eyes. The researcher catches him at it and retrieves one from under the sofa where it has rolled. There he finds his wife's ultra sound which he discovers has five fetuses visible. (This is actually getting tiring just to recount.)There is also a taxidermist (!) who lives closely with his retarded mother (!!) in a trailer. Really they are even closer than the limited space of the trailer would normally allow. She gives him a pair of bull horns (Romeo again) for his birthday which he loves. They go around selling his handiwork beside the road and at flea markets. A deaf mute man wants to buy the horns but he promised his mother that he won't sell them. Eventually, using information given him by his mother, he determines that the deaf mute must be his father. He goes to see the old man and accidentally gores himself while hugging his father. He returns home to find his mother dead and rabbits and white doves streaming out of the trailer.Meanwhile the teacher has returned from Spain with her mother and they go out to a restaurant where the mother is served a dish made from the bull (Toro in red wine sauce) that should have gone to another patron. The other man comes over to the table and discovers that he once knew the mother but calls her by a different name. She tells him he is mistaken. The women leave the restaurant where she suddenly steps in front of a van and is struck and killed. She is taken to a hospital where her liver is donated to the dying matador. The father comes to the hospital and tells his daughter that her mother did go by another name but changed it after murdering her best friend/female lover. The researcher's wife has to be carried out of their walk up apartment by pizza delivery guys and has five babies in the hospital. The actress and the ice skater attend nude sensitivity classes classes together and work up an ice skating act. The matador gets the liver and survives and his nurse has a baby in her womb which already likes him. I forgot what happens next. If this is your idea of a movie then be my guest. Instead of mentioning how it was done, how it was played, how it was shot, I'll just leave the plot lying around here because it expresses completely what's wrong with this film. Some people might read this and think 'that sounds interesting' and go see the film. Go in good health I say. Mind you though, it's quintuplets. Five. An overbearing retarded mother and a deaf mute father. A liver transplant and a murderous lesbian secret past. Fat naked people in a swimming pool doing sensitivity exercises while a snooty actress plays coy. A dead Great Dane. An epileptic five year old. And five babies. Some people loved it. It won awards.

A movie about various characters in three countries and a dead bull? This could easily be one of those tedious, plotless, arty French films I hate so much. In fact, it isn't. Carnages is an intriguing, well-made and sometimes funny movie, well worth seeing. The storyline centres around the remains of a dead bull, that one way or another turn up in the lives of the main characters, sometimes with dramatic consequences. This alone makes pleasant viewing for superficial moviegoers, but behind the main storyline are many layers the director invites us to explore. One of them is the parent-child relationship. One of the first scenes shows a bullfighter talking about his father, the movie ends with two brothers reunited with their long-lost father. One of them is father of quintuplets, the other lives with his mother. Another theme is the life-death contrast, and no doubt there are others I didn't discover. Feel free to do so yourself. Despite these themes and the various interwoven storylines, the movie isn't hard to view. There are many little jokes and funny situations. When one of the main characters orders eight pizza's for three people, this seems ridiculous. Only later the viewer realizes his pregnant wife was expecting quintuplets at that moment. What makes the movie even more enjoyable are the beautiful shots and the outstanding acting. In this film a shot of a little girl watching a bullfight on TV is an exciting scene. That's a difficult job to accomplish.