WriterM

The Emperor; naked and unwashed. It’s perfectly obvious that the characters in this film are presented as avant-garde and self obsessed bores. I found it embarrassing to behold because you’re forced to accept the characters’ self destructive behaviour as acceptable. In this unreal world most people smoke heavily and hold their cigarettes as a flag of supposed sophistication with nobody aware they’re headed for a future drowning in their own phlegm. The Loachesque free flow of overlapping conversations comes across as just copying Loach and is just annoying and uninteresting. I cannot believe this ever got made! In this ghastly world, pale and ghastly people wander about like a population made up of escapees from a psych ward. Nothing normal happens here, despite the thin veil of an attempt at normality by letting the cast free to improvise, the viewer has to observe stupid people pretending they’re tortured geniuses. The only torture actually happening is the poor audience on the rack. Unbelievably, and presumably too weak to counter the first critic who sees this as an opportunity to say the emperor is robed in light, all junior critics join in the nonsense. Even after his arrest for public indecency these people are in denial and are queuing up to visit the deluded monarch in the local loony bin. Not buying it.