Bertrand Bonello's The Pornographer is a beguiling experience that uses melodrama and rich symbolism to touch on a host of existential observations related to passivity, happiness, art, and success. The film is centered around Jacques, a renowned pornographic filmmaker whose 1970s films have become some of the most financially successful porno films of all time. Decades later, Jacques finds himself financially burdened but unable to escape the porno scene, which has completely changed from its more artistic ambitions, digressing into perversion. As Jacques wrestles with his past, showing how his artistic ambitions fell at the wayside due to the promise of commercial success, Jacques has reached a personal and professional impasse that finds him attempting to reconnect with his son and find his innerself once again. The Pornographer is an quiet, alienating experience full of half-baked ideas and fascinating observations. Using Jacques personal struggle of seeing his perfection become completely devoid of intimacy and romance, Bonello uses the perversity of pornography as a symbolic representation of the emotional disillusionment of this main character, a man who feels lost, detached, and unable to find happiness. Jacques' son Joseph turned his back on his father years ago due to his father's pornographic profession, and as the two reconnect, Bonello begins to draw parallels between these two characters. We learn that Jacques entered porn as a form of rebellion in the 1960s, and with his son now being a college student and political activist, it begins to become clear that these two men are much more similar than they appeared to be. To me, the dichotomy between these two characters is the most interesting aspect of the film, as The Pornographer becomes an interesting film about the pursuit of happiness, capturing how the pursuit and perception of doing what makes you happy is never simplistic, showing how we as individuals are sometimes clueless to what happiness truly is and how to achieve it. We are all simply trying to respond to a world we can and never will fully understand, attempting to make sense of it all through various methods, whether it be financial or political activism. Bonello's The Pornographer is a lesser effort from the extremely talented filmmaker due to its opaque nature that gets in the way of its ideas at times, but the way Bonello uses a existential family melodrama to raise lots of interesting thematic questions and ideas is still worth moderate praise.
1 Comment
|
AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
|