VIOLATION (2020) ★
"Violation" is a movie that makes me doubt that the people who made it watch movies themselves. If they do, their meager contribution to the art form is a clear indication that they don't understand the good ones, and can't recognize the bad ones. At least they got the title right, because I felt violated after watching this badly-made rape/revenge debacle. Truth in advertising.
I've seen several critics compare the imagery of the film to the work of Lars von Trier, which is clearly delusional. Cinematographer Adam Crosby does achieve some beautiful nature shots, one in the opening credits of a bucolic bridge over water, others of various wooded enclaves and wild animals. They're all marred by the shaky-shakys; Crosby apparently suffers from a personal fear of tripods, and took hand-held shots that weren't corrected in post. The result is Thomas Kinkade on caffeine.
When I apply the film's title to its story, I get more honest advertising, starting with the most basic precept of storytelling: Give viewers a sense of beginning, middle, and end. The film violates this rule by aimlessly jumping around in time, making confusing events even more confusing. When it introduces its protagonist, Miriam, played by Madeleine Sims-Fewer (who co-directs with Dusty Mancinelli), she's riding next to Caleb (Obi Abili), her husband. He's driving them somewhere, literally and figuratively. That's the tease, anyway. Judging by the lack of dialogue between them and their unhappy faces, I assume it's somewhere neither of them want to be, at least not together. This much I managed to comprehend.
Problem is, the film never explains what's eating them. They visit Miriam's sister, Greta (Anna Maguire), and her husband, Dylan (Jesse LaVercombe), at their country home. Shortly after their arrival is a scene of Caleb and Miriam in the shower together, brushing their teeth and sudsing up. Caleb has his back to her, and tells her when she asks him what's wrong that they'll talk later, but they never do. The writing is so bad that Caleb is a non-entity from start to finish, which is a galling thing to do to the only black person in the cast. He's treated like a token, there as a favor, as if the writers couldn't be bothered. Twenty minutes into the story, and he's all but disappeared.
The film then cuts to Miriam brutally murdering Dylan. He meets her alone at an unspecified house, and it's almost clear that they have a sexual history. But his murder is conjoined to badly-acted scenes of a cheerful Greta helpfully giving her sister relationship advice, and, in what appears to be a different time and place, a vicious Greta sniping angrily at her. I couldn't help but associate Maguire's character with Doctor Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, as her wild mood swings, meant to reveal critical character flaws in both women, played like something out of Gothic fiction. Yet none of this has anything to do with Miriam's motive for killing Dylan, and it's all unwisely shown after she starts hacking him to pieces.
It amounts to the revelation that Miriam and Dylan spent a night alone together. They flirted relentlessly. They kissed. They slept in each other's arms. And the next morning, Dylan fondled and penetrated her. Miriam whispered one feeble "No," and submitted to him without moving a muscle. And now she's going to even the score. Cue the blunt objects, the hacksaws, the plastic tarps, and about sixty gallons of blood.
Given the circumstances, you'd think the rape led to an already-traumatized Miriam's psychotic breakdown. But in real movies, like "Taxi Driver" and "Bad Lieutenant," which are cited in interviews of Sims-Fewer as her inspirations, such breakdowns occur after a gradual crescendo of ever-teetering madness, punctuated by increasingly illogical behavior. So how do I reconcile the post-rape scene when Miriam, all alone, calmly confronts Dylan about his crime against her? How does she feel comfortable enough to accuse her rapist to his face in a wood shed, with nobody else around? The movie makes no attempt to account for Greta and Caleb's whereabouts. It is then revealed that Dylan thought the encounter was consensual. With all the flirting, touching, kissing, and snuggling, his interpretation is a stretch.
I'm expected to see this as textbook rationalizing rapist behavior. Fine, except LaVercombe plays his confusion a little too deadpan for comfort, with it bookended on one side by clips of him being strangled, and on the other by me wishing everyone would lighten up. This is an ugly movie, made by people who ginned up the press by comparing themselves to Scorsese and Ferrara, without actually studying the films that made those men great. Everyone knows why Travis Bickle and the Lieutenant lost their minds. They inhabited worlds that chipped away at their sanity, scene by scene, until there was nothing left. It's a hard concept to imagine, but spend some time with De Niro and Keitel to see it done properly.
--- Bill Fontaine
