Film
Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
- Home
- Box Office
- Listings
- Trailers
- Features
Bookmark this page- Edition:
Carnages (2002)
Director: Delphine Gleize
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
This first feature traces the idea of oblique connections through a mix-and-match montage of tangentially related characters - the distinction being the near-surrealistic unaccountability with which it maintains its disjointed air. Writer/director Gleize made a 1999 short by the name of Le Piranha Andalou and in Carnages it's an Andalusian bull, dissected and dispatched through surgeries and supermarkets after it skewers a young toreador, that turns out to be the point of communion between the disparate individuals. Regrettably, that's not the only bull on offer here. Reluctant to spin out story threads, even tangled ones, Gleize instead tries to weave her tapestry with pure themes and metaphors. They don't hold. It's all beautifully mounted, but the skittish medley of ungrounded characters, each stuck in his or her inscrutable headspace, remains stubbornly uninvolving, despite the best efforts of the cast: Mastroianni as an actress struggling through ignominious gigs and swimming-pool 'primal scream' classes; Gamblin as a scientist philandering while his wife takes fertility pills; Molina as a jaded mother; young Molinier as an epileptic girl entranced by bullfighting and her own towering mastiff Fred (quite the performer himself). Carnages does have its fans (it won the Cannes Prix de la Jeunesse and the London Film Festival's Sutherland Trophy back in 2002), but Gleize's conception of the film as a crystal ball with a single story at its centre ('How do you see yourself?') looks pretty murky.Author: NB
Cast & crew
Director: Delphine Gleize
Producer: Jérôme Dopffer
Cast: Raphaëlle Molinier, Chiara Mastroianni, Lio, Lucia Sanchez, Esther Gorintin, Maryline Even, Clovis Cornillac, Bernard Sens, Pascal Bongard, Féodore Atkine, Julien Lescarret, Ángela Molina, Jacques Gamblin full cast
Duration: 133 mins
Most popular on this site
Features
To the letter
Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.
Mind over matter
David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.
Fool's gold
Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.
We are the championed
Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."
A history of violence
Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.
True romantic
James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.
Playing in the dark
MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.
Junk bonds
Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.
What do you think?
Post your review now