Bisexual Lighting: The Movie
Elle is a movie star with a perma-sneer stamped on her face, a taste for luxurious clothes, a golden penthouse the size of an Egyptian temple from which she plays her lonely Rapunzel routine atop a mist-plagued city, and more unresolved daddy issues than the whole cast of Magnolia. She’s currently filming a retro space opera with her once bestie, now evil stepmother Dominique, who brings her own Freudian can of worms. While a serial killer targets lost daughters under the cover of the mist, Elle has visions of Kay, an American soldier in Japan who is pursuing a bloody vendetta against the same threat.
Ambiguities quickly erupt like mushrooms. Is Kay the soldier a symbol of Elle’s unavailable father? Is the killer a symbol of the soldier? Assuming that Dominique’s marriage is an indirect response to Elle’s desire for her, is that response a yes or a no? Which of the two is Elle jealous of? Is Elle’s ingenue coworker Hunter actually a projection of her self-hatred? And what is the limbo of crystalline obelisks where the killer lurks?
Abandon all hope of getting explanations, O ye who enter. Filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn’s newest creation Her Private Hell is built on very specific, meticulously chosen vibes, and would be supremely irritated at the audacity of anyone suggesting that it might need to explain itself. Instead of offering answers, Refn has the movie parade its majestic set designs with mannequin dolls and Greek statues that ooze psychosexual tension; its grandiose orchestral soundtrack; its hypervirile men so rough that they literally light matches by rubbing them against themselves; its two-hued lighting that obscures alternating sides of the characters’ faces; its urban legends about the mist and the dangers it hides.
What comes closest to a statement on what the movie is about is a reference to the story The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen, a Dane like Refn. In the story, a starving girl freezes to death in the street while waiting for someone to buy matches from her. She is terrified of returning empty-handed to her father, who makes her work. As the night advances, she has delirious visions of the happy family life she wishes she had. She ends up in heaven, although those who see her dead body have no idea of her eternal bliss. Her Private Hell is full of lit matches, their smoke blending with the eerie mist that has enveloped the low levels of the city. Unlike the match girl, Elle is ridiculously wealthy, but her work is also done out of deference to her father, while her mind conjures a fantasy of a man running toward his daughter instead of away from her.
Another meaningful clue is a minor anecdote from the bacsktory of Elle’s father, who once bought an artpiece consisting of a tattooed fetus. To leave a literal mark on our children: that’s the curse of an all-devouring love.
Perhaps to give the viewer sufficient chance to decode these mountains of subtext, Her Private Hell proceeds at a painfully slow pace. But Refn is merciful enough to fill the runtime with compositions to please the eye: in a city where it’s always night, the artificial lighting is calculated to fall on body surfaces to evoke both joy and danger; the camera movements are choreographed with exquisite timing; and the still shots of pensive faces carry entire speeches’ worth of unspoken emotion. The many nebulous zones in the plot are magnificently filled with gorgeous scenery that gets all the spotlight it deserves.
The choice of final battlefield is of crucial importance (remember the Statue of Liberty in X-Men), and this is especially true in a movie as full of symbols as this. The misty limbo of phallic crystals is where Elle goes to resolve her destructive ambivalence toward her father, in a winning move that practically begs to be interpreted as castration. And yet, much remains to mull over. What does it mean that Elle solves the conflict with a weapon that her father gave her? What’s the link between Kay and Elle (that is, K and L), between his military rank of private and the title of the movie? Why are Dominique and her husband never seen together in the same frame? Why does Elle feel like a completely different person once Hunter leaves the story? What is the movie-inside-the-movie trying to say about the movie itself? And what on Earth is that mist?
At the risk of committing the sin of essentialism, we have to keep in mind that Her Private Hell was written and directed by a man, so the reach of the movie’s feminism will be limited. But all those mirrors, and the fixation with cigarettes, and the killer’s distinct modus operandi, have to mean something, even if the movie refuses to help. It’s obviously for a reason that the victims call the killer “daddy,” that two alleged spirits remark that being pierced is an omen of luck, that Elle’s in-character makeup puts solid teardrops on her face. This movie wants to say a lot, but seems terrified to spell any of it out.
Perhaps the silence is part of the message. Our unconfessed feelings about our parents can be unspeakable. But where words hesitate, light can’t lie.
Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
