Pink Asparagus

By Namah

Gentle Monster is an unfortunate case of squandered potential.

The mother-daughter relationship between Seydoux and Deneuve is a contemporary redux of Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. The frigid former maestro chastises her daughter, a tepid pianist who “deconstructs” male pop music at candlelit concerts, for her domestic decisions. For a female artist, the only thing worse than having children is moving to the country, she says.

While this tension between ambition and womanhood exists in the original text, Kreutzer turns away from Bergman’s assiduous investigations of female cruelty and towards the male psyche and its malevolence. This latent tension is more interesting than whatever manifests — the relationship between the women is reduced to set dressings and Lucy’s (Seydoux’s) so called-calling assumes the role of tasteless background music.

The disappointments keep coming! In Kreutzer’s case, the troubling discovery that a former collaborator was charged with the very crime her film investigates is rendered inert via an unfocused script—the murkiness of the subject matter itself notwithstanding. The film’s attempts at inducing unease through the haphazard inclusion of flashbacks, family footage and online activity are done neither thoughtfully nor artfully. Obvious and unnatural attempts at highlighting the rampant nature of sexual assault and the compromises women must make read as just that.

Gentle Monsters plays at TIFF September 15, 16, 19, and 20.