The Brutalist (Corbet)

Started by WorldForgot, January 28, 2025, 05:28:38 PM

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WorldForgot

Do we really not have a thread about this movie? Couldn't find one if so.




The Trauma of Inevitability: Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold on "The Brutalist"

An essay on its semiotics

Quote"Sometimes, art is bad for the environment, despite progressive desire, despite visionary passion. Very often, perhaps inevitably, architecture is bad for the environment. What can we do about this? And should we do anything about this? Criminal art. Criminal architecture. The crime of art. The novelist Philip Roth warned against "the unforeseen consequences of art." That's the key. You cannot know what you're really doing, not in the context of the universe, and so all notions of socially progressive work are basically delusions, and are to be realized accidentally, if at all.

Can such a thoroughly socially embedded art form as architecture be criminal? Even if it's bad architecture, environmentally irresponsible architecture, socially hostile architecture, Stalinist, brutalist, Nazi architecture? Can a building be criminal in its essence? I say it must be, it is. We must be honest here. All human architecture is a crime against nature, even that of Frank Lloyd Wright. Maybe even especially, because he understood what he was doing."
- Cronenberg

ono

Ever since Brody assaulted Berry on the stage at the Oscars (Will Smith, eat your heart out) and tanked his SNL episode with that stupid rasta thing, I can't take him seriously.  Yeah, that was 20 years ago.  Whatever.

max from fearless

I can't believe people compared this to a PTA movie. How freakin dare they!!!! This is a movie written from the outside in. PTA writes from the inside out. Second half was horrible, characters felt paper thin. Brody was good, but the script just kept beating on him and beating on him, which amounted to very little for me. And the zi0n1st ending of this thesis movie just made me sad. Between this and Nosferatu, I'm absolutely shocked at the current state of American movies...

WorldForgot

I dont think there's anything within this flick condoning zionism - it interrogates the entire concept.

wilberfan

Quote from: max from fearless on January 29, 2025, 01:11:01 PMI can't believe people compared this to a PTA movie. How freakin dare they!!!!  Between this and Nosferatu, I'm absolutely shocked at the current state of American movies...

Welcome to my club! There's coffee and donuts over there, and your membership card will arrive in the mail in a few days.  :yabbse-thumbup:

[edit] You should have included EMELIA PEREZ.  Good Lord...

WorldForgot

Elegy of cinema as interrogative pulpit. So far down into our media gestalt that we're encased by mediums. McLuhan's theory can't begin to dissect our daily symbiotic relationship with modes of expression and propaganda.

And so, Brady Corbet's current arc of three feature films shapes three arenas of mass influence via scorned protagonists. Aristocratic parlor games of war, pop music cult of personality, the material manifest of architecture - and the self-mythologizing people that make strides to confirm we are built to spill. The disparate time periods allow Corbet and partner - in life & art - Mona Fastvold gardens to sow. If it weren't for Vox Lux's glitter-chic emphasis we could pin a period piece ribbon on them both, a shorthand of staging.

But we are interrogating these characters in real time. Capitalism's indentured servitude of its peoples at the forefront, Israel is at first only shadowing Laszlo's life in America through overlap-dialogue clips, until it blooms in his family life a near decade later. In audience readings of the film's epilogue there's split interpretations to all this consequence. As if self-effacing myth weren't the worry all along.

The Brutalist doesn't make secret compartments of its hurt, it rejoices in our duplicitous celluloid dreams the way Laszlo Toth obscures his thesis from Doylestown tax payers only to render sky-high concrete irony on their hill, or Reynolds Woodcock nestling mantras within fabric - and the melodrama skirts self-seriousness of its grandeur by asking off the jump:

"Nothing can be of its own explanation– is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?"

Surely one can chew on much in this movie, the way Erzsebet, Zsofia, and Laszlo each bear the toll of trauma in physical negations. Its formal emphasis on 'means of production,' the narrative and technical space it jostles for along side its contemporary peers, death or myth of the auteur, and on and on. Whether Van Buren entered a marble womb or evaporated into the mist of his rotten legacy.

What strikes me most is Corbet and Fastvold's love of sigils.

In their first feature together, the film's epilogue embosses writ-large a wild cat mid shriek, a mane alike protagonist Prescott's hair of youth. Vox Lux strikes its midpoint shift with a bold reflective mask on Celeste, later recontextualized by terrorists - ripples of gunfire our leading popstar narrowly escaped at school. And for The Brutalist, each chapter is marked with a geometric circle, triangle, and square - a toppled home that can never right itself and yet flickers forever, stasis and motion at once.

Isn't it magnificent enough to see visions made physical manifest, and hold them forever? Add to that the dance of sigils, of crafting our abstracts into solid form. And what will that cross shine down onto, a hollow repurposing of horror survived.

max from fearless

Quote from: wilberfan on January 30, 2025, 09:36:30 PM
Quote from: max from fearless on January 29, 2025, 01:11:01 PMI can't believe people compared this to a PTA movie. How freakin dare they!!!!  Between this and Nosferatu, I'm absolutely shocked at the current state of American movies...

Welcome to my club! There's coffee and donuts over there, and your membership card will arrive in the mail in a few days.  :yabbse-thumbup:

[edit] You should have included EMELIA PEREZ.  Good Lord...

LOL. Coffee and donuts!?! This is great! But really I was absolutely SHOCKED to hear people compare Brutalist to PTA and have come to the conclusion that people arent even watching the actual films anymore...

Oh noooo, Haven't watched Emelia Perez yet and now I'm scared as I dig early Audiard (Un Prophete being my fav from him) and I've stayed away from EP reviews up until now...Going in with expectations now low low low...

RudyBlatnoyd

Found this quite underwhelming. To me, it felt like the kind of film that people who misunderstand and dislike PTA's work post-TWBB wish he was making: self-serious, humourless and constantly signalling its own preoccupation with capital-T Themes. Corbet has four hours to flesh out the characters, but by the end they're still only ciphers.

RudyBlatnoyd

Have to add: as a millennial like Corbet, I find it dispiriting how few English language filmmakers of our generation seem to have what it takes. Their work is almost all so lifeless and inert.

I'll make an exception for the Safdie bros.