I’m amazed that A Hole in My Heart was able to pass under the radar of the Society for the Promotion of Fear and Ignorance [sic] unscathed, though I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s because they suffered a collective aneurysm while trying to tally everything that’s wrong with it. Regardless, we can all rest safe knowing that Moodysson is probably going to hell, where he’ll spend his days reconstructing labias with Leni Riefenstahl as his aid.

So the question on everyone’s mind is: who ran over Moodysson’s dog? Trying to engage with a director’s persona(e) on a festival-to-festival basis can be a frustrating experience, and it’s obvious that a lot of audience bad karma is arriving via jealous-lover scorn. Retrospectively, Moodysson’s descent into the scorched ass of humanity does makes sense; it’s just that, well, logical fulfillment can suck for obvious reasons. Like when you have to watch one person vomit into another’s mouth (not nice). In a way, what he’s opted for is a kind of ‘backdoor’ humanism: an embrace of our damaged condition through the emphatic rejection of everything that’s wrong with it.

This is the same mathematical baiting that characterized Haneke circa Funny Games, only it might be more ‘honest’ than anything he ever did. For one, Moodysson is willing to splice himself – albeit kinda crudely – into the picture, via an actors-as-dolls analogy. Secondly, when he accuses the viewer of voyeurism-as-unspoken-consent, he carries through his convictions w/ surgical knife bared to throat. Dry, academic button-pushing has nothing on footage of vaginal surgery (ballz-to-the-wall); when asked how low can you go?, it seems that Moodysson’s struck an anatomical endpoint.

The grrrl in question is Tess, who perfectly inhabits a pocket of shiny and repulsive sexuality that porn has managed to make all its own. She’s busy shooting a low-concept porno in the living room of her director, whose son is hanging out in the room next door, listening to bad noise with the shutters drawn and occasionally taking time out to update his livejournal. The skewered father-son dynamic would be laughable (like ha ha, not haha, which it is) if it didn’t manage to recreate the camera-mugging theatrics of reality TV with such creepy accuracy. Which is Moodysson’s saving grace, really: his judge/jury/executioner power semantics aren’t worth getting pissed-off over because he’s assaulting a cultural phenomenon of Gazing, as opposed to joe-arthouse. Anyway, when someone is so persistently trying to work you over, it becomes increasingly difficult to dismiss things through rationalization: like, what I am supposed to say, for example, when the admiration of Tess’s vaginal facelift by her co-stars is inter-cut with recordings of the actual procedure? Much of the feedback results from this plugging in of nouveau-celebrity culture into an industry that struggles to achieve anonymity through total sex; as sensory conflict, it casts a woundingly pathetic glint over everything they do, tragically curtailing highs while revealing lows to be nothing more than fits of delusion, desperation and casual machismo.

Of course, the catch here is that by creating something that’s simultaneously moralistic and transgressive, Moodysson has sorta shot himself in the foot, inviting others to try and take the crown. Whoever that may be, let’s just hope they know a good doctor – for more reasons than one.—DL