seeing joe alwyn and margaret qualley having sex is somehow grosser than whatever the hell happened in the substance. i just cannot stand joe alwyn he's such a difficult sight to look at (i'm sorry) and he's just not a good actor bro. my hate for joe alwayn aside, the film seems to me a colonial fantasy in arthouse clothing, on the surface it follows trish's expat failure struggle as a failed imperial subject but the fictional “central american” country becomes a vague, mythicised third world lump that's essentially disposable and replaceable. it exists less as a political reality than as atmospheric backdrop for two white people’s existential and erotic crisis. the same goes for the local lives.
there is something superficially “radical” in the way trish’s body is shown as exhausted, exploited, and transactional in the aestheticisations, and in that precarity, it risks reproducing the very gendered and colonial optics it gestures against. this feels like a melancholic first-world projection of crisis onto a mythologised elsewhere.
i only write this much either when i adore the film, or hate, you go figure the rest. the extra 1/2 star was for the ending, well done mq i guess.
seeing joe alwyn and margaret qualley having sex is somehow grosser than whatever the hell happened in the substance. i just cannot stand joe alwyn he's such a difficult sight to look at (i'm sorry) and he's just not a good actor bro. my hate for joe alwayn aside, the film seems to me a colonial fantasy in arthouse clothing, on the surface it follows trish's expat failure struggle as a failed imperial subject but the fictional “central american” country becomes a vague, mythicised third world lump that's essentially disposable and replaceable. it exists less as a political reality than as atmospheric backdrop for two white people’s existential and erotic crisis. the same goes for the local lives.
there is something superficially “radical” in the way trish’s body is shown as exhausted, exploited, and transactional in the aestheticisations, and in that precarity, it risks reproducing the very gendered and colonial optics it gestures against. this feels like a melancholic first-world projection of crisis onto a mythologised elsewhere.
i only write this much either when i adore the film, or hate, you go figure the rest. the extra 1/2 star was for the ending, well done mq i guess.
