"Volver" was categorized as a comedy everywhere I looked, and it certainly had its amusing moments. But the inclusion of the rapist stepfather and incestuous grandfather gave me pause. I was not expecting that sort of thing, and I found it somewhat difficult to keep it from distracting from the rest of the movie. Your thoughts?
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Funny
"Volver" was categorized as a comedy everywhere I looked, and it certainly had its amusing moments. But the inclusion of the rapist stepfather and incestuous grandfather gave me pause. I was not expecting that sort of thing, and I found it somewhat difficult to keep it from distracting from the rest of the movie. Your thoughts?
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9 comments:
I don't think a comedy has to be funny, but regardless how much or how little humor was in it, I don't think this was a comedy. I see it as a drama. Not just the rape and incest, but the young woman's cancer and the murder of the old couple was all drama.
I think it was a drama, and a very good one.
This was supposed to be a comedy? Wow. I didn't get that at all.
Anyway -- aren't comedies/dramas supposed to be called "dramadies?"
I think this may be a movie where a lot was lost in translation.
I think the incest theme may be understood a bit differently in an extremely macho culture that hasn't had decades of Phil Donahue and Dr. Phil and an assortment of other Phils. This sort of treatment seems old-hat to us, but maybe in that culture that sort of thing is more recently finding it's way into the public consciousness and has a lot more shock value (a la "Chinatown" here in 1974 or "Peyton Place" in the '50s).
I didn't care for the inclusion of it. I think there are better ways to have discussions about the terrible tragedy of incest/sexual abuse/rape than to depict it on the silver screen as part of an entertainment. (I don't know any women who don't get queasy watching another woman being sexually victimized on screen, even if that woman gets some sort of "revenge" in the end).
Does showing women get victimized on screen, even in a context where they get revenge, promote victimization in the real world? Does it do the opposite? Perhaps it keeps people from forgetting that it is unspeakably horrible.
And victimization of women is a huge part of a lot of art. If it were gone, what would replace it? A more tame victimization (verbal abuse, perhaps)? Would it even need a replacement? Are you saying that there is plenty to write about without ever bringing that up?
For me, I just don't enjoy that kind of thing in my entertainment. In this case, it really cut my enjoyment of the movie. Just seeing that guy leering at the 14-year-old girl made me queasy.
So you're saying that if the point of a movie is to entertain the audience, things like that can always be left out. I totally agree with that.
Ben, I think you're trying to simpliify this too much. I'm not saying there should never be a film about those issues. It's a human experience. It shouldn't be off limits to artists of any kind. But it is very disturbing to see, especially for women. I think if more men said, "Hey, you know what? It's really awful to see women being sexually assaulted. I'm just not going to watch that anymore, unless the filmmaker is trying to say something really important about that issue." That would change the way Hollywood acts, I think. But men don't seem to have the same issues with it. And I think a lot of this stuff is done (especially when they show an actual assault) to be titillating, whether it's done that way consciously or not (the way the camera will linger on a image, etc., the way a woman's body is shown and her panic and the man's enjoyment). In my own experience, when stuff like that happens on screen, women tend to wince and turn away, and men seem to just watch it. I'm not saying it doesn't bother some men, but it doesn't seem to have the same effect on them.
Why would you have to "replace" victimizing women with something???
I completely agree.
Nevermind then.
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