Another movie post: Casablanca, Violation
May. 27th, 2026 09:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonster(When I start posting streams of film reviews all at once, just assume I'm in bed with a virus. That seems to be the way of things at the moment.)
Casablanca (1942): Casablanca, my beloved! I have previously seen and loved chunks of this movie but never, as far as I can remember, watched it the whole way through. It is so good. So utterly charming. Rick is an American expat who runs a popular café/bar in Vichy-controlled Casablanca, Morocco during WWII. After having had his heart broken by his beautiful ex-girlfriend Ilsa, Rick presents himself as a hardened cynic, out for himself and indifferent to the plight of all the refugees pouring through the city in their desperate efforts to escape from wartorn Europe. The act is not especially convincing. He has a long track record of fighting for the antifascist side in recent other wars, and is surrounded by a small core group of friends and employees who have been with him for years and to whom he is clearly unswervingly loyal. Nevertheless, he manages to more or less keep up the pretence until Ilsa unexpectedly shows up in town on the arm of Victor Laszlo, a famous Czech Resistance fighter who is on the run from the Nazis. Rick has it in his power to get Ilsa and Laszlo the visas they need to escape to America. Local Vichy and German leaders are bearing down on him. His own bitter feelings about Ilsa's betrayal tempt him closer to the dark side than any political pressure ever has. But the ending is perfect, and the whole film plays with the tension between political ideals and personal desire in the most touching, human way.
I need to watch a bunch more Humphrey Bogart films. He's just so unbelievably charismatic, and has a knack for turning roles that could be obnoxious into lovable forever favourites.
Violation (2020): This takes places over a several-day family visit between Miriam, her sister Greta, and their respective husbands. Miriam's marriage is in its death throes; one drunken evening she opens up about her problems to her brother-in-law, who responds by raping her. She addresses this situation first by trying to talk it out with him, and then, when he denies the assault and insists she really wanted it, by murdering him in cold blood and mixing his powdered bones into a batch of homemade ice cream for the rest of the family to eat.
The only other rape-revenge movies I've seen so far are the I Spit On Your Grave remakes, and this was like their perfect polar opposite. The rapist is a normal dude who has a close established friendship with his victim; the rape is "non-violent" and papered over as a misunderstanding. The film basically took a death-grip hold of that "was it ~really rape, did it ~count as a trauma, is it actually my fault, did I not fight hard enough" feeling so endemic to our rape culture and did not loosen it for even a moment - fucking harrowing stuff, but harrowing in a completely different way than a more graphic, brutal rape scene is harrowing. There's a far heavier focus on the relationships involved than on the act of sexual violence; Miriam's strained bonds with her sister and husband seem as much a part of the trauma as her brother-in-law's betrayal. Most of the screentime is devoted to long, almost painfully intimate scenes of completely mundane human interactions. Miriam's revenge by contrast is almost surreal: she executes a meticulously planned murder and disposes of the body with nauseating thoroughness. Far from catharsis, the murder only seems to traumatise her worse than ever.
The cinematography was exquisite, albeit heavy-handed. I am not film literate enough to know what to properly call this but it felt like the audio-visual equivalent of what in a novel we might call MFA writing: polished to an almost distracting shine, packed full of "elevated" metaphors, reluctant to say anything in a simple character beat that could instead be said through several long minutes of obscure atmospheric shots. Extremely pretty! Very artistic! SO pretentious! There is one quite surprising scene immediately before the murder where we zoom in super close on the rapist's naked erection. I don't think I've ever seen a head-on shot of an erect penis outside of porn. I thought the choice to show that so explicitly was an interesting contrast to the rape scene, which was filmed in this uncomfortably evocative, eroticised but completely non-explicit way: lots of heavy breathing, undulating fabric, grabbing hands, zero other skin on display.
I have loved nonlinear narratives in written fiction and I'm sure there are many ways I'd love them in film; in this case it felt like one abstraction too many, and I had a much better time once I gave up around the one-third mark and looked up a linear plot summary on Wikipedia. I guess in summary I'm not entirely sure what I make of this film, but watching it sure was an Experience.
Casablanca (1942): Casablanca, my beloved! I have previously seen and loved chunks of this movie but never, as far as I can remember, watched it the whole way through. It is so good. So utterly charming. Rick is an American expat who runs a popular café/bar in Vichy-controlled Casablanca, Morocco during WWII. After having had his heart broken by his beautiful ex-girlfriend Ilsa, Rick presents himself as a hardened cynic, out for himself and indifferent to the plight of all the refugees pouring through the city in their desperate efforts to escape from wartorn Europe. The act is not especially convincing. He has a long track record of fighting for the antifascist side in recent other wars, and is surrounded by a small core group of friends and employees who have been with him for years and to whom he is clearly unswervingly loyal. Nevertheless, he manages to more or less keep up the pretence until Ilsa unexpectedly shows up in town on the arm of Victor Laszlo, a famous Czech Resistance fighter who is on the run from the Nazis. Rick has it in his power to get Ilsa and Laszlo the visas they need to escape to America. Local Vichy and German leaders are bearing down on him. His own bitter feelings about Ilsa's betrayal tempt him closer to the dark side than any political pressure ever has. But the ending is perfect, and the whole film plays with the tension between political ideals and personal desire in the most touching, human way.
I need to watch a bunch more Humphrey Bogart films. He's just so unbelievably charismatic, and has a knack for turning roles that could be obnoxious into lovable forever favourites.
Violation (2020): This takes places over a several-day family visit between Miriam, her sister Greta, and their respective husbands. Miriam's marriage is in its death throes; one drunken evening she opens up about her problems to her brother-in-law, who responds by raping her. She addresses this situation first by trying to talk it out with him, and then, when he denies the assault and insists she really wanted it, by murdering him in cold blood and mixing his powdered bones into a batch of homemade ice cream for the rest of the family to eat.
The only other rape-revenge movies I've seen so far are the I Spit On Your Grave remakes, and this was like their perfect polar opposite. The rapist is a normal dude who has a close established friendship with his victim; the rape is "non-violent" and papered over as a misunderstanding. The film basically took a death-grip hold of that "was it ~really rape, did it ~count as a trauma, is it actually my fault, did I not fight hard enough" feeling so endemic to our rape culture and did not loosen it for even a moment - fucking harrowing stuff, but harrowing in a completely different way than a more graphic, brutal rape scene is harrowing. There's a far heavier focus on the relationships involved than on the act of sexual violence; Miriam's strained bonds with her sister and husband seem as much a part of the trauma as her brother-in-law's betrayal. Most of the screentime is devoted to long, almost painfully intimate scenes of completely mundane human interactions. Miriam's revenge by contrast is almost surreal: she executes a meticulously planned murder and disposes of the body with nauseating thoroughness. Far from catharsis, the murder only seems to traumatise her worse than ever.
The cinematography was exquisite, albeit heavy-handed. I am not film literate enough to know what to properly call this but it felt like the audio-visual equivalent of what in a novel we might call MFA writing: polished to an almost distracting shine, packed full of "elevated" metaphors, reluctant to say anything in a simple character beat that could instead be said through several long minutes of obscure atmospheric shots. Extremely pretty! Very artistic! SO pretentious! There is one quite surprising scene immediately before the murder where we zoom in super close on the rapist's naked erection. I don't think I've ever seen a head-on shot of an erect penis outside of porn. I thought the choice to show that so explicitly was an interesting contrast to the rape scene, which was filmed in this uncomfortably evocative, eroticised but completely non-explicit way: lots of heavy breathing, undulating fabric, grabbing hands, zero other skin on display.
I have loved nonlinear narratives in written fiction and I'm sure there are many ways I'd love them in film; in this case it felt like one abstraction too many, and I had a much better time once I gave up around the one-third mark and looked up a linear plot summary on Wikipedia. I guess in summary I'm not entirely sure what I make of this film, but watching it sure was an Experience.
