Container (2006)

Director: Lukas Moodysson

Screenplay: Lukas Moodysson

Cast: Jena Malone as The Voice; Peter Lorentzon as the Man; Mariha Åberg as the Woman

Synopsis: With voiceover by Jena Malone, Container follows a transgender man (Peter Lorentzon) whose life is a debris filled apartment ripped apart by his own thoughts. From the death of porn star Savannah to fear of the nuclear bomb, Container is an existential stream-of-consciousness where the voiceover, both his and separate as Malone's, connects together the images into a whole.

Container for the unprepared is an extreme film in structure. Difficult and liable to frustrate. In context of Lukas Moodysson's career it makes sense how his filmography got here however. His debut Show Me Love (1998) was an immense hit, a tale of adolescent love between two girls causing a wave of critical acclaim. Add Together (2000) and Moodysson even won the acclaim of his country's greater auteur Ingmar Bergman. For whatever reason however, this wave of acclaim was clearly a cause of an existential crisis. Lilya 4-ever (2002), whilst also acclaimed, also gained a lot of backlash for its perceived heavy-handedness, and thus the existential crisis began properly. Leading to the transgressive A Hole in My Heart (2004) and Container. Both of which gained negative reactions between them. With hindsight Container proved to be a necessity, Mammoth (2009) his small step back towards the mainstream, We Are the Best! (2013) about three young girls starting a punk band winning hearts all over again. And Container itself has a lot to say, deliberately the work of a filmmaker who is using it to dissect his own state of mind as much as its central character played by Peter Lorentzon. It says a lot that, within the documentary footage included with the DVD release, Moodysson has a psychiatrist, a Church of England vicar and a psychic see the film and/or the exhibition that came with it initially in England, and allowed them scrutinise his subconscious.

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I was aware  that this was never going to be easy to digest, which helped me be the perfect person to view the production as I was prepared for its notoriety. Container, with patience, is actually a good film. It will need repeat viewings. And particularly, whilst the monochromes images are important, it's the script and how Jena Malone reads them which stands out the most in terms of the production's virtues. A stream-of-consciousness, this structure is always difficult at first. A stream-of-consciousness eliminates the pauses and punctuation that allow one to ingest information in spoken and written speak clearly. It removes divides between one subject to another, allowing them to bleed into each other. Read aloud, whilst helping with the flow, also means you do not have the ability to re-read passages again for clarity unless you rewound the film back. The result, like William S. Burroughs at his most extreme in Naked Lunch, takes work at first to fully understand.

Whilst Malone at one point even explains herself as her real self, an actress merely reading lines despite playing actor Lorentzon's character, what you actually get is what can be viewed as the beginning of a 21st century existential fear. There is for myself the increasing thought that, when the Millennium took place and the world did not end, we as a society at least in the Western world entered this new century without purpose. Our narrator portrays both the transgendered man as much as a form of herself, the kind of twenty something Millennial who shifts onwards in the current state confused. Someone who fears their mortality constantly, yet feels they are God at other times. Considers God outside of themselves, yet are fixated on celebrities and topics Kylie Minogue cancer scare. Letters of Holocaust concentration camp victims are collected alongside porn star Savannah's boots, at first potentially tasteless unless viewed in the context of chaos of this century, that so much is to be digested these objects collect, clash and meld as one and the other. It varies between pathetic first world problems to real, sad moments of brevity, all of which I suspect is Moodysson himself bleeding out God knows what demons he had to purge at this period in his career.

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The visuals are as important. Squalor but never poverty pornography. Nudity, mass orgies and cramped apartments. Even that which could come off as weird and pretentious art performances in another film, such as anything with the dolls' heads and wearing objects as inappropriate dress, make sense in Container's logic, which is as much addressing this material world and scrutinising it as the words spoken by Malone's voiceover do. All the objects, from a Bing Cosby memorial plate to a dank mattress, become a psycho dramatic view of a life, which was enforced by that exhibition Moodysson created using the real props from the film that allowed people to scrutinise the objects in closer detail. The monochrome, rich and detailed like a Nobuyoshi Araki photograph, allows the film to exist out of conventional chronology but still keep a viewer within the world inside with some semblance of logic, between fiction and documentary but felt fully. What one should feel Container is the psychological state of its main character which it succeeds in.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Expressionist

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Personal Opinion:

Not a film to compare to Moodysson's dramas. One which sadly become obscure but understandably when it presents a sharp and drastic change in pace from the likes of Show Me Love. On its own however its absolutely admirable and worthy of re-evaluation.

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