A monochrome-toned film that veers too
close to violence-porn, not to mention a crude self-righteousness. (Review by
Patrick Compton -6)
Gruelling and relentlessly violent, this
Dutch film is Tarantino without the relief of humour or that wonderfully
evocative tongue lodged firmly in his cinematic cheek.
Brimstone is the second film, after Viceroy’s
House, to be commercially released following its screening at the recently
completed Durban International Film Festival.
Dutch writer-director Martin Koolhaven
comes over as someone who has read but not properly absorbed Cormac McCarthy.
His film is a Western horror show with an unrelenting Old Testament kick. And,
for a film that expresses its horror of religiously sanctioned patriarchal
social customs, it spends an awful lot of time torturing women and exposing
them to horrific examples of frontier “justice”.
The image that sums up the film is the
startling sight of a pastor’s wife (played by a luckless Carice van Houten) in
a “scold’s bridal”, a gadget that apparently existed and was used in 19th
century America to punish errant wives.
This is a film that takes a lengthy 149
minutes to drag us through a series of humiliations suffered by women on the
Western frontier. Its various segments, entitled Revelation, Exodus, Genesis and Retribution,
give you a sense of its biblical origins. The main character, unsurprisingly,
is a woman, Liz (a remarkable performance by Dakota Fanning who conjures a
symphony of emotions without speech). Equally unsurprising is the fact that she
is mute, her tongue having earlier been ripped out. No delicacy in the
symbolism here.
Married to a good man (a rarity in this
movie) and with two children in her care, Liz is a midwife in an isolated
frontier community. A difficult birth causes problems that are accentuated by
the arrival of a new preacher, someone who gives her the heeby-jeebies. This
scarred fellow, played with dark relish by Guy Pearce, is the nastiest of
villains, not least because of his sanctimonious attitude that apparently
justifies all manner of dark deeds.
After its first chapter, the film proceeds
backwards in Exodus and Genesis, explaining the background to
the tense relationship between Liz and the preacher, with Emilia Jones doing a
good job as Liz’s younger self. The final segment, Retribution, then returns us to the present.
The film offers us some gruesome moments: a
man’s guts wrapped around his neck, pigs eating a corpse and women being
belt-whipped. The film’s constant insistence on sin and hell-fire is certainly
reflected in its austerely chilling images, conjured by cinematographer Rogier
Stoffers, one of the production’s high points.
In the main, however, the aptly named Brimstone is a monochrome-toned film
that veers too close to violence-porn, not to mention a crude
self-righteousness as if the director believed that he is the first person to
discover man’s inhumanity to man, or, in this case, women.
Brimstone opened at Cinema Nouveau, Gateway, on August 4. – Patrick Compton
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