Dionysos

It’s like stepping into a music box and closing the lid behind you: its sentimental melody evokes a forced melancholy, yet the melodic scent of a decaying flower of kitsch in every measure reminds us that the main character has closed the lid of a coffin behind her. The uncompromising nature of our hero's chosen path is also transferred to the film, as both manage to overdose into a blissful apathy that always signifies liberation from conventional life for cinema—while society rushes somewhere, a heroin trip is a paradoxical halt that runs in all directions (the camera capturing this lethargy does not chase the usual chain of events and lingers on faces, forgetting itself, while the music, with its anesthetic tempo, slows the pulse). Just as this ecstatic leap into love for everything and everyone (regardless of gender, age, etc., with homosexual tones set against the background of operatic music and camera work reminiscent of Werner Schroeter) inevitably leads to an undeniable and logical love for death, and it is well known that death never shares with anything: mors vincit omnia. In terms of form and content, it is so (Philippe) Garrel-esque that it is almost not beautiful, yet it is beautiful.

Dehors-dedans, inside-out: an avant-garde film of its time, which, with its intimate and fragmented form, might evoke expectations of an unconsidered chaining of random scenes, something we witness in many other contemporary experimental films. However, the film has a relatively thoughtful structure defined by its title: we observe the oscillation between the closed inner space of an isolated individual and its penetration into the outer world, all within sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit parables. It is indeed a mix of intimate anti-social self-examination reminiscent of the style of Wedding Trough (1974) and leftist or Debordian studies of the society of the spectacle (saturated with disillusionment following the failure of the Western revolution of 1968), combined with anticipations of feminist films by Valie Export and others, in which characters destroy their bodies as a form of protest. In this sense, it is characteristic that these influences are directly linked in the character of the main protagonist, model Catherine Jourdan, who allows various objects of an alienating culture to penetrate her beautiful body, cut out from the advertising mythology of superficiality—as if under the skin of the spectacle—so that from the inside, a deliberately repulsive yet rebellious female vessel can expel the pus that will famously hold up a mirror to us. Given the repeated literal play of inside-out in examining what can fit into a woman's vagina, the film aspires to a retroactively found cult status (regardless of genre).

If justice is blind, truth can be mute: fortunately, neither the director nor the cameraman were blind, as the camera shots dazzle with their restrained purism of Indian light and darkness, like the purism of the young lawyer's idealism in the face of the excesses of power. While the mute faces - the dogs of the lower castes and the slow pacing of the film create the illusion of some sort of Indian Kafkaesque world, where the abstraction of the "missing resolution of the world" and the invisibility of power prepared the viewer for another generalizing experience (which they would quickly forget after the screening), the director is not afraid to masterfully cut to the quick and reveal the lament of wounded flesh behind the mask of silence and restrained aestheticism: the mask falls, and it is Shelley's "Masque of Anarchy," shouting in the best Indian English, "I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!"