... yeah, this is another one of those. Because if the story was just laid out in linear fashion, it would be pretty flimsy. Trouble is that although our curiosity is certainly piqued in terms of backstory, we get nothing satisfying other than the trite "we were the cast off's of society" nonsense. Time skips of months, and years are just interspersed with backstory in a way that is absurd. Add to that a completely needless soft-core solo-porn scene with once titan of acting Juliette Binoche, and you'll be remarking that the award for prosthetic should go to the journeyman who crafted the most over-the-top bush committed to celluloid in decades. Ok, I understand there is realism... we have to believe that they are on a ship where water is scarce and shaving is not an option, but if you have respect for the female body, don't flash it at us while the woman is riding a dildo machine... show it in a tasteful scene where issues of privacy among passengers is laid out for the audience to consider. I mean, here's a genuine artsy question to ask: in a zero gravity prison (yeah, they make up an excuse for gravity to exist, but let's conceded it's at lease REDUCED gravity...) where intercourse is verboten and the ships doctor is going full-on jungle bush queen, do the women wear bras, or not? It's an honest question about the female body, women's lib. (Just a generation ago that women were burning their bras in acts of self-liberation, in the pre-judgemental, pre-consumer-brainwashed era of humanist ideals.) But instead of exploring those questions of an intimate, personal nature, we get a dildo machine with red lights (all that is missing is a bucket on a chain and they can re-enact flash dance!) This film claims to be high art, but in my opinion it's garbage. In the "making of" bonus on the DVD, there is a still of the screenplay. If you pause it and actually read it, the language is what you'd expect to find in those grocery store pulp paperbacks with pictures of shirtless men that look like Fabio on the cover and only the thinnest claim to literary merit. Everything in the space sequences that is meant to build tension has been done before. Black holes? See Interstellar. Encounter with derelict full of feral animals who were being experimented on? See Ad Astra. Existential questions about isolation in space? See Moon. In fact, Moon is pretty much everything that this film pretends to be. But do yourself a favor and skip High Live.
High Life
(2018)
You know those films that depend on telling the story out of order...
28 January 2020