chickenfeet

The Night Porter

This is one weird, fucked up film. Charlotte Rampling plays the elegant wife of an opera conductor. While he is conducting Die Zauberflote in Vienna (1957) she encounters Max (Dirk Bogarde) with whom she was previously 'romantically' engaged. The twist is that then she was a teenage concentration camp inmate and he was an SS officer and the relationship had the sort of dynamic one might expect. She is more than willing to take up where they left off which leads to some really weird and disturbing juxtapositions of then and now images. Think starving, spaced out, inmates watching a guard bugger a prisoner next to Papageno charming the animals. It just gets more disturbing from then on. As a side note, Miss Rampling has a fantastic ass and Mr Bogarde has very odd nipples.

Jesus of Montreal

Denys Arcand and the usual suspects do the Passion of Christ with added Robert Lepage. An out of work actor is asked to 'update' a traditional 'stations of the cross' pageant. He recruits a cast from the workaday world of Quebecois acting; T&A beer commercials and dubbing porn into French. The result is critical acclaim and martyrdom at the hands of the Catholic hierarchy, the Montreal police and the Quebec health system. Organ donation ensues. Denys Arcand at his best. By turns hilarious and gut wrenching.