
Review by Beatrice On 23-Jun-2023
A young girl is left at a border, beyond which she is no longer in U.S. territory and no longer protected by the law.
It is the area known as the defective lot, a sort of public dump with all kinds of discarded items: aircraft, automotive, electronic, including every kind of human and inhuman material.
The mottos of this area are: "find the dream, find comfort."
The girl is captured by two women, tied up like a rabid dog, and at the right moment, amputated alive for the day's meal.
Groups of tattooed and deformed bodybuilders roam the area, proteins being the most common food...
The music is overwhelming, alternating from the most commercial to the most sophisticated, like the conceptual electronic music of Nicolas Jaar with Mi Muer.
Miamiman is a man with a wife and daughter for whom he makes portraits and for whom he does not hesitate to snap necks, dissect, and cook human bodies.
The vultures are always on the alert while the rich preacher of the place, an unrecognizable Keanu Reeves, has a gigantic radio as his stage, a metaphor for the media that enchant the masses.
He reiterates that in the defective lot there are those who are not considered healthy, intelligent, etc., enough by the rest of the world; but now is the time for awakening and the only rule is: FIND THE DREAM, find the dream!
According to him, it is not drugs that make him so rich but the economy of the place... and you can't enter the dream if the dream doesn't enter you.
Things cannot be seen if we continue to see them only as we know how to see them, and one must ask oneself what one truly wants: this seems to be the solution.
The Alice in badland of this film wanders without an arm and with a prosthetic leg, trying to understand through rabbits and pleasant places if indeed we are all equal.
A mega metaphor for the contemporary world, teeming with defective lots, where the outcasts are not literal cannibals but are cannibalized to have the "privilege" of being in a protected area.
The captivity that raises humans for consumption does not contradict the elegant reminder of Schopenhauer's will, which makes functionaries of the species, passive to the reproductive mechanism of the will to live.
Agbogbloshie, in Ghana, the largest electronic waste dump, along with Old Seelampur near Delhi, are probably no more dignified for the workers there than the humanity depicted in Amirpour's film.
It is assumed that cannibalism is not practiced, simply because it has already been practiced outside: homo homini lupus teaches.
A film that unsettles without formal hesitation, great soundtrack, sublime setting.
Art signs its name.
23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice