Agatha Christie meets Ingmar Bergman.
The art house darling of 2023 and the winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival is a piece of trash. A consummate, exciting, brilliantly written, directed and performed piece of trash: a provocative courtroom drama, an intense thriller, a confounding whodunnit. But it's also a profound mediation on truth and on love, and on what every individual loses when they enter into a marriage.
WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION meets SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE.
It's not the subject matter I object to — I don't think any topic should be off-limits — it's the approach. Domestic abuse, psychological torture, marital rape are issues that shouldn't be so handily aestheticized. This story of a woman, trapped in a marriage to a dangerously possessive psychotic, wants it both ways: it wants to be taken seriously as a social problem film, but it also gets off on playing the erotic thriller.
Early Fassbinder TV movie that plays out a number of dom/sub scenarios among a two girls — one a virtuous maid, the other an amateur prostitute — and a group of soldiers stationed in their small town. Structurally a sex farce, although there's a sharp sense of melancholy that pervades the whole thing and the ending is quite dark. The 90 minutes fly by.
