Container

There are two things you should know about director Lukas Moodysson that go some way to explain where he’s coming from with his new anti-crowd pleaser: 1) He published a book of poetry at the age of 17. 2) In a 2002 Sight and Sound poll, he selected Harmony Korine’s ‘Gummo’ as one of his favourite films of all time. This ponderous slab of no-wave nihilism is very much the sum of these two considerations as we witness an obese transvestite (Peter Lorentzon) and the extraction of his ‘inner female’ (played by diminutive Asian dancer Mariha Åberg). All the while, Jena Malone (as herself) spins unrelated yarns about, for example, how paparazzi photographers wanted to take pictures of Mary’s tits at the birth of Christ. ‘Container’ throws down a miscellany of stark monochrome imagery and seemingly pointless thoughts (with the odd rumble on the soundtrack) then urges the viewer to create their own film from the fragments. A conceptual art, it’s both strangely beautiful and beautifully strange, as well as being a far cry from even Moodysson’s challenging last, ‘A Hole in my Heart’.