Resin (2001) User Reviews

Pretty good movie, may be slow for some

[se7en187 · 8/10 · 9 April 2003]

I saw this film last summer at the Waterfront Film Festival in Saugatuck, Michigan. It is the only film festival I've gone to, so I didn't really know what to expect, just that I should be open to slow paced movies.

Well, Resin is pretty slow paced, but it wasn't bad. It's a Dogme95 film, so it's not really for all audiences. For those who don't know, Dogme movies are a unique style of filmmaking, which began with the film Festen AKA The Celebration. Some more famous Dogme type movies are Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark.

***MINOR PLOT SPOILERS***

Resin is about a drug dealer, who after getting arrested and beat up in jail, vows to make one final store and a fresh start, but ends up getting in trouble with the legal system who threaten to steal his freedom.

** To be honest, this, Breaking the Waves, and Dancer in the Dark are the only Dogme movies I've seen, so maybe if I watch some more I can appreciate Resin more. At times the film is very dimly lit, shaky, and quiet, but that's part of the Dogme rules, it has to use natural light and can't be on sound stages.

So though I'm a sucker for films with court scenes in them, Resin was pretty good.

*** 1/2 out of ****

The first American Dogme 95 film is an exceptional piece of work.

[epetrov · 10/10 · 5 January 2002]

The stated purpose of the Dogme 95 manifesto is to strip the art of filmmaking of its decadent trappings and to return it to the purity that resides behind movie illusion. Theoretically, the Dogme Vow of Chastity should force the filmmaker and, therefore, the viewer, to confront the essentials presented on the screen without intervention or amelioration. Resin, the first American Dogme film is an example of the movement at its best. The work has an explicit political agenda, and if the film is read simply as polemic, it is successful in making clear the tragic absurdities in the California penal code. However, Resin transcends its politics and renders an unforgettable portrait of a human being caught in the dispassionate machinery of a society which first alienates then destroys him. The camera's unrelenting eye, stripped of artifice, binds us to Zeke in his struggle with a system in which he clearly never had a chance and forces us to confront his vulnerability, the inarticulate youthfulness which is helpless against the slick maneuverings of the forces marshaled against him: the public defenders, the narcs, the prosecuting attorneys. In Resin, the Dogme technique of apparent cinematic artlessness, paradoxically, has itself become art, while the practices employed in the destruction of movie illusion have created a far more complex illusion: the sense that we have somehow come to know and to lament as real, a young man who exists only on film.