2023-08-04 13:39:02
Two cops and a woman struggling with a serial killer. Barbaric and beautiful, anxiety-provoking cinema seen as a hallucination. Double award at the Reims Polar festival.
A hallucination, a mirage. From the start, the Chinese director Soi Cheang (Dog Bite Dog) plunges into an apocalyptic Hong Kong, a rainy mix between a giant landfill and the 7th circle of the Underworld, a city in weightlessness, engulfed in limbo. For two hours, the poor spectator will wade through this nightmarish cesspool with characters haunted by revenge and death, and a serial killer who, in his spare time, cuts up his victims’ hands with various rusty and blunt objects. preferably. On his heels, a new police recruit, inexperienced but tenacious, a veteran cop in a raincoat with the scent of a hunting dog, a puncher who explodes anything that moves, and a resilient young woman, a real human punching bag. There follows a descent into hell or a way of the cross, for all the protagonists who plunge into a universe of pain and struggle to survive a few more seconds…
ATOMIZE THE SPECTATOR’S RETIN
Despite a sometimes predictable scenario, Limbo works at 2000% because it is a pure staging object. Between two shocks, we try in vain to catch our breath, stunned, and Limbo provokes the same sensations as seminal works like Se7en, I met the devil, or certain paintings by Jérôme Bosch. As with David Fincher or Kim Jee-woon, it is the overpowering of the realization that amazes, asphyxiates. Soi Cheang’s goal is to physically test his spectator, to make him lose his bearings, to atomize his retina, to pound his neurons. And he succeeds with the telluric force of his traveling shots, his plans seen from the sky, thanks to his genius for framing, his way of saturating the image and the background or playing with the architecture. Sometimes Soi Cheang seems to go too far in darkness or extreme violence (notably with a problematic rape scene), but he always lands on his feet thanks to his protagonists, in particular the female character, a junkie who survives the worst outrages, damned on the way to redemption.
It’s absolutely stunning, especially since the film, too, comes back from hell. Completed more than four years ago, Limbo was blocked by Chinese censorship. If the film was shot in color, Soi Cheang converted it to black and white to try to attenuate its violence in front of a censorship which remained inflexible. After a presentation at a Berlin online festival, the film – a veritable commercial suicide – was hardly released anywhere in the world, before its triumph at the Reims Polar festival (Grand Prix and Critics’ Prize). A double price that convinced its distributor to release it in theaters. No film of this summer (and probably of the year) will simultaneously give you this anxiety-inducing uneasiness by its subject and this euphoric epiphany thanks to its artifices. You know what you have left to do…
LIMBO
SOI CHANG
THEATER RELEASE ON JULY 12
By Marc Godin
1691259674
#Film #month #Limbo
