Thread by @filmobjective

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Polanski’s Bitter Moon (1992).

I rarely say this. But this is a demeaning film. Its POV is sexist in a way that makes everyone worthless. It's SO cynical. It has the rare dishonor of being a film I hate thematically far more than the actors and visuals deserve.

The reason is not just its execution, which prioritizes cheesy narration to sell every small emotional detail, falsely excusing the visuals from being as creative as they could be. That just makes it boring.

What makes it truly vile is its completely unempathetic worldview.

Movies that lack empathy for men are not uncommon but rarely are they this ambitious. Every male drive and desire is shown as evil in Bitter Moon, utterly condemnable. Even the capacity to love is portrayed as WEAKNESS. A man's desire to kill himself is portrayed as inevitable.

Our grotesque protagonist emotionally tortures a woman; when he’s at her mercy, she tortures him back.

The problem is that his torture is horrific cruelty but hers is retaliation. This framing demeans BOTH of them. Here are the things Bitter Moon believes that make it so wrong:

1. Men have no virtue, by nature
2. All male desire is evil
3. Women cannot be evil until corrupted by a man
4. Women are so naturally pure that they cannot be blamed for corruption

These 4 things spin in the film’s cynical human gutter till everyone comes out w/ ZERO agency.

Men are unable to become worthy of empathy; women have no power to do anything except in response to being wronged by, or desired by, men.

Its lack of agency is so out of touch. Real people create living emotional dynamics. Even when toxic, real emotions are not so mechanical.

This film does everything it can do wrong to a story that requires sincere, human chaos to tell effectively. I'd highly recommend Verhoeven’s TURKISH DELIGHT (1973) and SPETTERS (1980) for the same emotional premise done w/ actual human nature added back to the equation.

But then, there’s one LAST layer of awful. This nymphic torture-goddess, that drives every man insane, is Polanski’s wife.

So now, no matter how much the film suggests that female trophies are unattainable by unworthy men, at the heart of the movie is the director’s “victory.”

This last bit of framing makes the film even ickier.

Because it’s not just a movie that has no empathy for men or women. It’s a movie that abuses the audience's feelings so a sexually experimental director can j*ck off to fake self-loathing while proclaiming his dominance.

He "got" the woman we kill ourselves to get.
This movie made me incredibly uncomfortable. I don't need every film to have upstanding values or represent everyone heroically, quite the opposite.

But Phantom Thread exists. Spetters exists. Bitter Moon is an emotional forgery.