Review by Beatrice On 29-Oct-2023
By virtue of a scholarship for academic merit Oliver Quick, of modest background, finds himself inside Oxford University, habitually attended by wealthy scions, mostly heirs and privileged. As soon as he makes his entrance, he is immediately mocked for his looks, which are considered less than appropriate for the environment.
Initially excluded from that world along with another talented mathematician, he has the opportunity to show himself helpful and magnanimous to Felix Catton, who had already attracted his attention as his classmate, handsome, magnetic, charming, extremely attractive to the female planet, as well as a scion of a wealthy family.
Invited to take part in the student group and nurtured the friendly relationship he is also invited to spend the summer at the family estate/castle in Saltburn.
The impact with the environment of the sumptuous manor, among the rooms, halls, gardens, labyrinths, paintings as well as eccentric and amusing if cumbersome and demanding family, seems decisive in making Oliver identify the purpose and choices his life will have to take.
No compromise with where he comes from intends for the clumsy and awkward student of his beginnings to travel: the means will be justified by the end and the end decorated and served by the lie.
The strong attraction to that world, its intensity, the passions that corrode him, the fluids that attract him whether they be female menstrual or male spermatic in nature, provide for no hesitation.
After Fennell's unforgettable, deservedly award-winning debut with the excellent film A Woman of Promise, we find ourselves in the grip of a tsunami of trepidations where the unconscious clearly has the upper hand over the rational element and emotional and visual violence constitutes the explosion of disturbance at the margin between enjoyment and pathology.
On the one hand, the attraction to a contamination that comes from below, on the other hand, the spasmodic search for the law of counterbalance brought about by the social divide.
Not only that, Oliver, is unaware of himself, he lives in the grip of his own instincts; he worships beauty, he is overwhelmed by it, irresistibly attracted to it: he is devoid of desire, his is pure, exclusive, absolute fulfillment.
Oliver is a foreign body wherever you place him, while Felix is always in harmony with his surroundings: one ugly and awkward, the other beautiful and attractive.
The sadistic, sweeping, hypnotic, disturbing tale exerts an unconditional attraction to violence, evil, betrayal, and nausea.
An epic about the noble, bourgeois, functional or dysfunctional family over which Fennel exerts the pressure of desire that becomes obsession, admiration that turns into acrimony, love that becomes hate, passion that exerts and turns into martyrdom.
The disproportionality of wanting to be other than oneself, of the inability to accept one's own condition: if beauty, wealth, magic, privilege, are all on the same side, something happens, and if it is not the redistribution of wealth that intervenes the individual exercises his own unique, talented, manipulative ability with an effective, if unmaskable tool, that of compulsive lying.
Telling evil through the mythology of the labyrinth where the minotaur towers, telling it where the beautiful is pitted against the ugly, the rich separated from the poor, the diabolical antithetical to the angelic, cunning opposed to naiveté, lies separated from sincerity makes Fennel's visual art irresistibly magnetic, and this was also true of her Woman of Promise where the ethical plane seemed decidedly more structured.
It is not a question of ethics being more or less present or absent; the focus here is on violence for its own sake, whether suffered, acted upon, practiced, planned, determined: the violence of the masculine on the feminine, the violence of those who do not oppose violence, the violence of social discrimination, the violence of the aesthetics of the beautiful versus that of the ugly, the violence as such that attracts precisely because it solicits the sense of smell in the face of the scandal of saying, seeing, affirming, representing the unbridled rush of the casual, impudent, reckless but above all obscene shamelessness of evil.
That evil which Oliver's unmissable final dance, represents with extreme grace, in all its most effective, powerful, artistic ease.
There is nothing more irritating than to be rich, from a good family, handsome, cultured, intelligent and even good and, at the same time, to possess no special aptitude, no originality or at least an idea that can be said to be truly personal.
29-Oct-2023 by Beatrice
