With his 74-minute feature Container, Swedish avant-garde filmmaker Lucas Moodysson plunges, headfirst, into a surrealistic dreamscape and offers a sharp critique of contemporary society. In crafting this motion picture, the director pulls the audience into a different cinematic mindset - a stream of consciousness mode of storytelling, where he floods the viewer with everything at once - "relevant and irrelevant" - in lieu of a more conventional, linear narrative mode. Shot in patchy, grainy, high-contrast black-and-white, the film follows an obese man as he carries an Asian woman, piggyback, through a garbage-filled landscape. Meanwhile, an American actress (Jena Malone) narrates a series of free-association thoughts and voices a number of characters on the soundtrack, drifting languidly (in the Pynchonian sense) in and out of coherence - her observations laden with references to pop culture, spirituality, and consumerism.
by Nathan Southern
synopsis
