In 1978, Woody Allen told Newsweek magazine:
‘When you do comedy you’re not sitting at the grown-ups’ table, you’re
sitting at the children’s table’. But that’s not the whole story. Who is to
say that, once you’ve been promoted to sit among the grown-ups, you will be
equipped to tell your fish knife from your soup spoon? Allen demonstrated
only the most superficial understanding of maturity when he made the
turbulent journey from the seriously funny Annie Hall (1977), a genuinely
adult comedy, to the hilariously po-faced Interiors (1978), which was like
Bergman for dummies. He must by now have been sitting at the grown-ups’
table for long enough to realise that, in truth, there is no such thing.
Allen is not the only writer-director to have laboured under such delusions.
The Swedish filmmaker Lukas Moodysson is the latest to swap his clown’s
clothes for a hairshirt. The anxiety and despair evident in Moodysson’s most
recent films, Lilya 4-Ever (2002) and A Hole in My Heart (2004) contrast
starkly with the jubilant humanity of his first two features Show Me Love (aka
Fucking Amal) (1998) and Together (2000). The volte face is so alarming, not
because it reveals some suppressed truth obscured by the optimism of the
earlier movies, but because it seems motivated by the idea that drama is a
higher art form than comedy – and not just drama, but a masochistic strain
of drama that punishes the viewer for looking.
The socially conscious theme of Lilya 4-Ever, about a young girl
press-ganged into prostitution, was always going to demand a harrowing
approach. Less excusable is the approach of A Hole in My Heart, which
resembles an adolescent cry of outrage against a checklist of modern ills
from consumerism to reality TV to the exploitation of women. Seriousness of
subject appears to have impeded Moodysson’s skill as a filmmaker and
storyteller. In seeking to accentuate the emotional conflicts that pulsed
through those early films, and make them the prime focus of his new work,
Moodysson has provided more of an insight into his own internal struggles
and conflicts than those of his characters.
Together was a compassionate comedy with a tough centre: it addressed
notions of identity and assimilation, conformity and rebellion, and located
patriarchal conventions in a supposedly subversive hippy commune, just as it
uncovered transgression beyond the commune’s doorstep. In the communal
football match, with which the movie ended, most of the tensions between the
characters were smoothed out. This was a picture that seemed as much a
diplomatic proposal as a comedy, though its compassion was successfully
mingled with prickly realism. (Contrast this with the recent Crash (2005),
where the same ‘Why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along?’ message is wrapped in
sugar coating and force-fed to the audience.)
Something dramatic has happened to Moodysson by the time of A Hole in My
Heart. On a visual level the director throws in everything including the
kitchen sink. The protracted assault on the viewer’s senses – represented by
violent hand-held camerawork, aggressive death metal and grisly scenes
involving mock dissections of plastic genitalia – is intended to correspond
with the sensory overload and moral breakdown that Moodysson is diagnosing
in early
21st-century Western culture. There had been signs in Lilya 4-Ever that he
had grown disillusioned with soliciting the audience’s goodwill – something
that Together had done efficiently enough to be a legitimate crossover hit.
The Abba soundtrack of Together was replaced by the merciless metal of
Rammstein in Lilya 4-Ever, and the switch could not help but seem cosmetic –
another example perhaps of the erstwhile entertainer assuming a poker face
in order to be allowed at the grown-ups’ table. With his third picture,
Moodysson began to flirt with intimidation as a plausible narrative tool,
much as Godard had done in Weekend (1967), and Haneke had in Benny’s Video
(1992) and Funny Games (1997). That flirtation progressed to an unequivocal
embrace in A Hole in My Heart.
The film is preoccupied with physical and sexual violence. Viewed alongside
Together, where the scenes dissolve gently into one another, unlike the
jarring jump-cuts in the later film, the metamorphosis would be staggering
if it didn’t feel so contrived. Moodysson seemed suddenly to disparage the
very idea of entertainment, which could ultimately be his undoing. As
Pauline Kael once remarked: ‘If art isn’t entertainment, what is it?
Punishment?’ Moodysson is certainly labouring under that misapprehension.
Whereas Together articulated the human fight between individuality and
assimilation in eloquent terms, A Hole in My Heart is structured as
organised chaos in which the subject of conflict becomes inadvertently
obscured.
Even as he has tried to move away from what he perceives as an egotistical
quest for acceptance by alienating as many admirers of Together as he can,
Moodysson has only illuminated a tired artistic struggle that has been
fought for centuries. He would like A Hole in My Heart to be viewed as a
protest against consumerist society. In fact it is a protest only against
the artist’s fight to be taken seriously, to leave behind the children’s
table forever.
Ryan Gilbey is a film critic for the Sunday Times, Guardian, Observer and Sight & Sound. He has written two books, Don’t Worry Me (Faber) and Groundhog Day (BFI Publishing)