The
War Zone
Rated R
Opens Friday, March 3
DISCLAIMER:
Due to the nature of this film, it's impossible to talk
about what it means without giving away certain important
plot points. We highly recommend that you see the film before
reading this review--but do see it.
During a screening
of The War Zone at the Toronto Film Festival, a man
ran from the theater screaming that he couldn't handle it
and attempted to pull the fire alarm; Tim Roth reportedly
calmed him down.
Roth enigmatically
dedicates The War Zone to his father.
Nudity is such a cinematic convention that using it as
something beyond just ornamentation is rare. The naked bodies
flaunted in typical mainstream movies are generally models
of Hollywood perfection existing solely for titillation,
or sometimes for purposes of "emotional honesty" (think
of Harvey Keitel in The Piano or Bad Lieutenant).
In either presentation, the body is something to look at
without giving much thought to what that body means to the
character, or to us as viewers. Since nudity is so commonly--and
often thoughtlessly--exploited, it's gotten to the point
that we accept it yet no longer feel it. The exception is
when a director uses nudity to make us uncomfortable and
confused. Some movies may employ naked moments to toy with
our sexually voyeuristic tendencies for a brief instant,
but seldom do filmmakers make it a thematic refrain. In
Tim Roth's The War Zone, voyeuristic confusion is
pushed to the limits, not just in audiences, but in the
characters as well.
Based on Alexander Stuart's award-winning novel (he also
wrote the script), Roth's directorial debut takes the common
theme of incest and complicates the usual knee-jerk melodrama
with which the subject is so often treated. This is not
Michelle Pfeiffer wailing in A Thousand Acres, but
rather a remote, delicately detail-driven, expertly acted
and patient feature that generates an atmosphere of horror
in the most "natural" setting: an outwardly normal, middle-class
English family. This family consists of the modestly named
Dad (Ray Winstone), a big, cheerful bloke; Mum (Tilda Swinton),
a pregnant, sturdy, stereotypical Mother England type; Jessie
(Lara Belmont), an attractive 18-year-old priming herself
for college; and her little brother, Tom (Freddie Cunliffe),
a sullen 15-year-old struggling with adolescence, from whose
viewpoint the story is told. Trying to make a fresh start,
the clan relocates from London to the bleak, overcast Devon
region, on the southwest coast of England, where they live
as a close-knit unit in a rustic cottage. Close-knit is
an understatement: After a new baby is born, Mum is seen
openly breast-feeding, Dad immodestly walks around naked,
and Tom chats to his topless sister in her bedroom. Depending
on your own upbringing, this all seems either hippie-healthy
or uncomfortably libertine. Either way, it's certainly not
a typical narrative setup for the imminent moment we anxiously
expect, but for which we still can't quite prepare.
When Tom glimpses a disturbing moment between his sister
and father--invisible to the audience--he begins to investigate
their relationship. His habitual teenage depression gloomily
transforms into both morbid fascination and raw heartbreak.
When Tom confronts Jessie, she initially denies everything.
But the more Tom sees, and the more confused and disgusted
he becomes, the more Jessie silently admits.
When the film's shattering centerpiece--an act we sense
with foreboding from the outset--finally arrives, Roth roughly
fuses the audience's point of view with Tom's, and it's
clear that his brooding behavior is not merely the product
of normal contempt. In an old army bunker perched above
the sea, Dad quietly sodomizes his sobbing daughter, while
Tom secretly watches and videotapes the act from outside.
As seen from Tom's eyes--locked predominantly on Jessie's
face--the act, shot in real time, becomes a nerve-wracking
sequence of relentless horror. Naturally, we feel sickened
for both Jessie and Tom, but there's something more there:
We also feel horrible--and perhaps guilty--about ourselves.
Knowingly, cleverly, Roth has already presented the unquestionably
desirable Jessie naked several times, which not only piques
our interest, but also, since we share Tom's viewpoint,
even turns us on with taboo. So when we witness this brutal
rape, our initial attraction oscillates to deep revulsion
so wildly that Roth makes us feel like offenders.
From this moment on, we, the viewers, becomes much like
Tom: awkward, wounded, confused and pissed off.
In the wrong hands, this could have been cheaply exploitative,
like using an easy shock to gain resonance or fake depth
in a character study. But Roth--whose static, painterly
style has been compared to Bergman and Tarkovsky--has really
done something unique. He subtly indicts the audience, along
with the father. Without using a moral sledgehammer, both
Roth and his talented cast (especially the remarkable newcomers
Belmont and Cunliffe) challenge the viewer's sexual gaze
and the movie audience's "normal" practice in watching nude
bodies. He's not judging, but asking: "What are you looking
at, and why?" Like the reality of incest, these questions
don't have easy answers. It's just another concept that
a deeply troubling film requires us to ponder in our own
confused minds.
The film's apt title applies to the family, to the minds
of all the characters, and to the human body. Here the body
is a thing of bewilderment--a stifled temple that in its
most perverse state is not even one's own. This movie is
not just a warning call about incest; it is too personal
and oblique for that. Roth has created a work of such disquieting
resonance that just what he is up to remains difficult to
resolve.
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Willamette Week | originally
published March 1,
2000
|
