Mammoth

dir. Lukas Moodysson
USA, 2009

Stars Michelle Williams and Gael Garcia Bernal.

This film appeared as if Moodysson had been given themes - sex trafficing, Western economic imperialism/exploitation, banality of consumerism, lack of family/time etc - and had a bit of a freak out and clumsily put them together. This film was BAD, but there were moments of accidental (and totally not down to Moodysson's choices, I don't think) power - like the cut from Williams opening the garage-sized fridge in her SoHo loft to the tiny Phillipines kitchen of her nanny's family. That is a vulgar fact and maybe actually was helped by its communication in the clumsy vulgar way that Moodysson does it - to make it subtle is to misunderstand the very nature of the thing you are trying to communicate, which is quite possibly the least subtle, most vulgar thing possible: people have a lot and others have not much at all.

The film was full of these moments, making it a very strange proposition indeed. It really was BAD, don't get me wrong, but it was bad in a very, VERY odd way. The weird spiritualistic mammoth/elephant metaphor running through it, complete with ominous-sounding droney music; the first cut to the nanny's boys growing up in the Phillipines, when you realised that as well as a semi-Lost in Translation it was also a semi-Babel; the bemusing choice of Williams' character's profession (a ER doctor) when the seeming point of this couple's existence in the film was to show the vacuousness of Western life. The strange non-relationship that Williams' and Bernal's characters had - no amount of time was spent establishing what it was like, so one got the impression it wasn't that bad not that good either, and one wondered that in a better film this relationship would have been fleshed out more but also maybe in the process too-determined, too causal, too subtle, really, thus making it less realistic, that maybe the point of this relationship was that it was not "in crisis" nor "perfect".

Perhaps "not subtle, but in which clumsiness performs the same functions as subtle" would be a good way to describe this odd film. Perhaps not. Either way, Lilya 4-Ever is MUCH better.