PIGS BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

Bestial screams to cover and devour human perversions.

A speeding car, a boy in fancy camperos strangles a young woman in stilettos in a pigsty where the cries of noisy omnivores cover any human heartbreak.

Miu, a slim, petite young woman, is taken to the home of Rosella, a 60-year-old Serbian woman married to a local fat young man, Sven. The lady has purchased her good luck charm, Miu in fact is supposed to, no one knows how, help her get pregnant and fulfill her wish list including having smoother and more moisturized skin.

She paid a lot of money for it and will pay another 10,000 kroner when she has a child.

Meanwhile, her Albanian brother Andrej, whom she considers handsome, runs a brothel of illegal girls, relegated to the basement of the house as prison servants.

The immigrant trade parades down the catwalk amid neon lights and sequins while upstairs Miu wanders around the house making strange noises, walking on armchairs and sofas: the young girl in the blue jumpsuit looks like an automaton, she manifests no expressions, no emotions, she observes with an absorbed, disturbing and indecipherable gaze.

Rosella engages in the activity that should enable her to get pregnant while her husband Sven grunts like a pig.

The first episode in Balkan sauce(The Mysterious Miu) intersects with the second in bittersweet Chinese sauce(Revenge is My Name) to land on the third(Dragon Palace) in the wonderful, glacial, deluxe, phallocratic Danish residence.

Glasses to avoid evil glances, ads to auction off Miu; Mother Hulda runs a Chinese restaurant from Mr. Chiang who took her daughter away to secure a voracious underworld ring.

They are all criminals the characters in NWR, the Danish capital Cowboy mirrors the same Mexican atmosphere of the earlier hypnotic Too Old to Die Young.

But here Miu sees first; she was abducted by aliens at age 7 and has unpredictable superhero powers, yet she needs papers.

Entering the Danish home of Niklas the young scion who gets off on strangling young women, she senses a presence...which will reveal its prediction in the sixth episode(The Sky Will Fall), closing of the first series and opening of the eventual future second..

A palace, the Danish one, where NWR expresses his irrepressible photographic/aesthetic need: here the Oedipal complex, already amply depicted in Only God Forgives, resurfaces with overbearance especially as the delusional paternal phallocentrism does not hesitate to bring forth its effects with delirious speeches, apologies of the self and of one's penis as a monument to the glory of the world.

"One thing binds us," he says in fact to his son, "one thing that everyone envies and covets and that marks absolute power: the cock."

Therefore, both parents, in the most hilarious, surprising, and extraordinarily brilliant scene of the series, where the camera pans by rotating on itself over their son Niklas and his parents as they subject him to opening the gift they have designed for him: a very elegant red box with a satin bow that the boy cannot open and which contains the cock. The cruel amusement of the father and mother at the ineptitude of their son, unable to unwrap the "package" he probably does not know what to do with, will end with an unpredictable outcome.

After this incredible roundup of creative, surreal, grotesque and ingenious skill, the fourth episode(From Mr. Chiang with Love) and the fifth(Copenhagen) fail to stand on the same wavelength as the first three.

However, the body of Niklas left for the pigs to eat by Miu holds some special surprises, in addition to the presence of NWR himself among the experts who have to consider how to reconstruct the boy's rotting body deprived even of the organ so praised by his father, devoured this time by the pigs: "everyone dreams of redefining themselves, and if we can recreate the penis, why not make it bigger, powerful, creative; wouldn't you like to have a conversation with your dick?"

Indeed, experts believe we can recreate the sacred object for Niklas!

Miu brings upon herself the evil (physical pain) and moral pain of the world, but no one can do to her what she deliberately does not accept.

Miu must continue to defend herself, to do justice, to restore a rule in ontological chaos.

Her beyond-human gaze is that of one who knows the all-too-human human.

Miu is Heideggerianically thrown into the world but she is a heroine and defends those she loves with Kung Fu blows.

An almost autistic, blue-clad, casual anthropomorphic goddess, a mix between Ariadne meeting a series of Minotaurs in the human labyrinth, between Cassandra's prophecies and Pandora's visions of evils without access to hope.

A chaotic interlocking of human and animal crimes from the sunset of the West, where money rules any relationship by tearing apart and rotting any perverse relational puzzle.

A western via crucis, comedy, tragedy, sitcom, between science fiction, noir and mythological odyssey.

The male is done to pieces, Danish cinema always does justice, and this spiritual sequel to Too Old to Die Young, as Refn calls it, is an absolute visual, sensory, emotional experience. A hypnotic slow-motion nightmare in which the unconscious comes out stunned and even revealed.

The human "slaughterhouse" however is magically represented: refined and morbid, sophisticated and putrid, elegant and gruesome.

The immoral anthropological undergrowth represented by NWR continually restores an eye-catching allure where the bandages covering the decomposing body seem to be signed by luxurious and exclusive brands.

The unnatural colors smell of artifice as the pseudo human nature of putrefaction.

"IL MALE VESTE PRADA" and Miu knows how to move with elegance and restraint in the mystical/diabolical journey of cosmic hell.

The NWR film brand leaves its mark, still, with some structural, semantic and semiotic stumbling blocks, but its chaotic, visionary and di-sturbed creativity continues to provoke and unsettle to evoke unmistakable signs of artistic vitality.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice