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| Movie Name : |
Peterloo
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| Cinema Type : |
Hollywood
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| Release Date : |
09-Nov-2018( 6 years, 18 days ago)
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| Directed By : |
Mike Leigh |
| Production House : |
Georgina Lowe |
| Genre : |
Drama |
| Lead Role : |
Rory Kinnear, Maxine Peake, Neil Bell
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Rating:3/5
Announcing itself as a film in “Six Acts and an Epilogue,” “Suspiria” is set in the year the first film was released, 1977, in divided Berlin, as the Baader-Meinhof gang-related hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 is taking place. A young student at a dance academy is convinced that the place is being run by witches; she frantically tries to convince her psychiatrist, who writes “delusions” in his notebook. This girl disappears; it’s later speculated (incorrectly) that she got overinvolved with radical groups in the divided city. The psychiatrist, played by “newcomer” Lutz Ebersdorf (whom many think is the film’s costar Tilda Swinton in old-male makeup), is tortured by the loss of his wife in World War II. I bring up these two particular threads because they don’t exist in the Argento movie and represent this film’s attempt to make its supernatural horror story resonant to real-world themes and tragedies.
But it's actually an insulting, opportunistic co-opting of history, which makes the film pretentious. What makes it repellent is the hifalutin brand of misogyny it (relentlessly) soft-pedals, and the deliberately excessive horror imagery it throws up with giggly glee. Whatever you think of Argento’s “Suspiria,” or his work overall, you have to admit that his morbid sadism appears to arise from an authentic impulse.
For Guadagnino, simulated carnage is just another app. I’m racking my brain to find another example of an instance in which a director used his complete artistic freedom for the purpose of flaunting his absolute lack of artistic conviction. And I’m not coming up with much. If you loved “Call Me By Your Name,” you won’t recognize “Suspiria.” It’s too bad for my purposes that I didn’t out-and-out hate “Call Me by Your Name,” because if I had, I could say in addition to that that if you loved “Call Me by Your Name,” you deserve “Suspiria.”