Innocence

So I saw Sucker Punch! And I love Sucker Punch and I will continue to love it for a very long time. I was going to write about some of the hatered that has been arrayed twords it but then I realized that I don't actually care. Haters gonna hate! Also I mean it is the internet and people just sort of spew whatever the hell it is they feel like without any regard for quality and who am I to look down upon such an endevor. This blog right here has never been checked for grammar and I only go back and fix red squigglies every so often and there are some things I've written about here that I am flat out wrong about so you know whatever.

That and I saw Innocence. Innocence is one of the first movie I've seen in a very long time that has challanged my views/perceptions of the world, and believe me I try. This is the sort of thing I go for. I could wank my credentials here but I don't feel like it.

The thing about Innocence is that it does absolutly everything to be as sinister as possible without any of it ever coming to fuitition. In a lot of ways it plays out like a gothic novel where you keep expecting death and destruction to happen at every turn, and yet it doesn't. However, unlike The Mysteries of Udolpho I actually liked this movie a lot. It starts off with a bunch of random, disjointed images that do eventually make sense later. Then there is a casket with a sun pattern on the top containing a very young girl. The girl wakes up, doesn't know where she is, where her brother is, or where her family is. The other girls dress her (oh yes she is naked, prepubescent female nudity), and explain with a strange sort of matter of factness that no one will visit her, that there are rules, and that there is punishment for breaking the rules.

From there the movie meanders on sometimes following around one charecter or another allowing the viewer to explore the mysteries of the strange boarding school but without ever really learning very much about it. We know that there is a high wall surrounding the grounds with no way in or out, that there is vent leading to somewhere, that there is a shadowy headmisteress who only comes once a year to visit the middle aged girls. She inspects them all and then takes one away and she is never seen again. Other than that the whole compound is policed by two older women, a teacher with a limp, and a ballet instructor. Rumors abound about these 4. One rumor is that the older servants are girls who tried to escape and their punishment is to stay and serve the other girls. Another rumor is that the teacher with the limp had her leg broken by the headmisteress as punishment. None of these rumors are substantiated and while punishment is often threatened we never actually see any of it take place.

And all the while the movie drips with mystery, dread, and implications none of these feelings are at all justified. Certainly, the circumstances surrounding this boarding school are very odd. However, there is no indication that there is any sort of misconduct on the part of anyone. The frequent female nudity remains ever prescent but it is never prescented in an exploitative way. Instead it is just part of life and living in an all girl communinty where swimming, running and playing outside are all frequently encouraged activities.

The first thing that seems at all out of place is when we discover that the oldest girls give ballet preformances at night in a secret stage behind a grand father clock. It is twords the end of the movie, anyone keeping track of running times knows this, and yet even still there is nothing untword going on. The girls never see anyone in the audience either before or after the show and they are fully clothed so it isn't like they are preforming some sort of horrible nudie sexual evilness, and you know what? At this point in the movie it would of been welcomed. The dread I was feeling has been in overdrive the entire movie as I had learned to like these little girls and I was never able to, not even for a second, trust the school that they belonged to. But no, it was just a dance.

At the end of the movie I felt more than a little dirty and ashamed. I just spent 90 minutes expecting that something horrible in nature to happen to these girls. Other than some of the peculiarities of the setting I had no real reason to. Maybe it is because I've seen one to many fucked up movies in my life, or maybe it is because I belong to a culture where there is a hyperactive and prevasive sense of fear, especially fear surrounding children and their abuse. Now the movie itself is french and there might be some cultural barriers in regards to how we treat children, and I definitely know there are cultural barriers twords our attitudes regarding boarding schools because they are relatively rare in our country yet I am 90% certain that the unending sense of dread was a purposeful choice on the part of the director. I feel that I was made to suspect the worst and to expect horror around every turn because I had lost what the main characters have.

Ultimately I wanna see it again. In a couple of months I need to let it sit so that when I watch it again I can see the movie for what it is instead of what my culture has trained me to view it as. It is an interesting problem though. Like I know for certain that the movie does have some dark undertones but NOTHING like what I was expecting to happen so I'll be interested to see what happens when I see it again.

THis movie kinda came out of knowwhere for me and I am really glad it happened to me. It is the first time in a long time that a movie has stuck around in my head begging me to mess with it. Normally that area is reserved for the written media so well done movie. Well done.