Review by Beatrice On 25-Aug-2024
The one who feels like a wound when she bleeds knows much more about herself than the one who sees herself as a flower because it pleases her partner.
New Mexico
Bodies in training, muscles, weightlifting to the rhythm of 1847-Heart by Harald Grosskopf: Jackie, a young bodybuilder, enters and catches the eye of Lou, who is in charge of managing the gym.
A place sprinkled with more or less pop quotes.
The bodybuilder wants to participate in and win the state bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas: she has beautiful legs, looks sculpted, is imposing, majestic, and alone.
She looks for a place to sleep, and Lou invites her to stay at her place after offering her free anabolic steroids.
Here they engage in a passionate sexual relationship and begin a cohabitation where the body, fissures, wounds, fluids, and blood are the main characters. Love, in fact, lies bleeding or perhaps lies while bleeding.
Both have secret, complex, traumatic lives.
Jackie's mother calls her a monster and tells her to disappear from her life.
Lou's mother is gone, and it’s unknown how... her father, Lou Sr., is the head of a criminal organization that uses the Canyon's crevices as a natural cemetery.
Lou hates him but is his result; she has a sister, Bethany, who married a dirty, aggressive, and violent man who beats her to the point of death while she inexplicably continues to love him until Jackie, pumped full of anabolic steroids, beats him savagely, splitting his face open and sending him to hell.
Amid bodies to be trained, hidden, or contained, the two girls become accomplices in an unstoppable criminal path: one due to inheritance, the other due to exuberance.
The latter is going crazy and transforming without being aware, while the other, though trying to stop and purify herself from that relentless world, seems destined to embody it.
A lesbian-criminal story full of fissures to penetrate and devoid of concepts to explore, except the one that has now become commercially cinematic after the always untimely master, Lars von Trier, has been practicing it for at least 30 years: woman is the result of the alienating manipulation of patriarchal power.
Alienation as submission and subordination or alienation as an equal and opposite reaction.
To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction: Newton's third law of motion, introduced by Isaac Newton in 1687: if body A exerts a force on body B, then B exerts an equal and opposite force on A.
The whole film seems to rest on this law; Lou acts on Jackie, who in turn reacts, while both are the result of an equal and opposite reaction to the world, the family, the reality they have lived, and which they try to rebel against, however equaling it.
After all, they are bodies, the material result of violence, abuse, power, patriarchy; they are the result of the cultural whip, insidious, cancerous.
One can reject the male but not avoid the ancestral, hidden, surreptitious, deceitful, eventful culture of origin, unfortunately.
From the manure fertilized by violence, only the superwoman can be born... of the beyond-woman, still no trace...
The image of undeformed nature arises only in deformation, as its antithesis. Where it pretends to be human, male society educates in women its corrective, and through this limitation, reveals its face as a ruthless master. The female character is the cast, the negative of domination: and is therefore equally bad.
25-Aug-2024 by Beatrice