A Hole in My Heart Lukas Moodysson Sweden 2004
The moment Lukas Moodysson’s provocative new film, A Hole in My Heart, clinches the deal, confirming its horrific brilliance is where a principal character covers his eyes with plasters. By this stage through Moodysson’s trawl this is an act many of the audience with whom you watch this film may have done in their own way, using their hands or by voting with their feet and electing to leave the auditorium. Such are the dark sights of this spiteful work of tumourus love that this action signals a concession to the degradations on offer proving that somewhere, perhaps deeply buried within the director’s troubled cranium is a shared repulsion for the content or at least an acceptance of its heavy nature.
Either interpretation, Moodysson takes us down a deep dark pit and then masterfully empathises with us, as if at the climax of the latest militaristic action no-brainer a character drops to his knees in pained realisation at the uncountable goons he has despatched. Gone are the monotone moralistic tones of Lilya-4-Ever, long gone are the bitter-sweet musings of Together. These earlier works surface in the mix fleetingly through a lost girl on a motorway bridge or a couple of innocents playing with a washing machine, but what’s left is the depravity created by four fractured individuals in a flat and an audience’s struggle to cope with watching this. This is Lilya-4-Ever in an awfully wide world with no straight answers or the moment Michael Nyqvist in Together screams forlornly at the disintegration of his family, elongated to feature proportions.
In this vicious parody of reality Rickard directs an amateur porn film in his flat starring Gecko, Tess and himself. His suicidal son Eric also lives here, spending most of his time in his room listening to punishingly atonal electronic music. Loosely following a linear narrative the characters flirt around the flat revealing a cornucopia of angst within each of them as the acts they perform descend toward the fetishistic end of hard core pornography.
Big Brother is actually mentioned in A Hole in My Heart when Rickard reveals he didn’t post Tess’ application to the show. In many senses the confined space of the film’s setting, the flat, suits the reference well. To provide drive each of the characters is sufficiently background stacked to allow it all to seep out. With video diary style segments, both direct to camera and to Rickard’s camera in porno style interview (i.e. interviews along the line of ‘yes, I’m horny, I’ve always wanted to be a porn star’ etc) it approaches reality style television or more appropriately for the subject matter - web cams. The content is extreme, and if it wasn’t enough Moodysson goads us further, flashing images of genital surgery with high-pitched shrieks of static and doll simulations of sexual acts. Yet adhering to the tenets of reality television when it goes well, what’s initially on show, however titillating, is eclipsed by what’s revealed.
With the shots of surgery and the opening bursts of full on nudity, what’s left is what’s inside. As this is a public film, even with today’s gradual censorship relaxation, inside thankfully means character that is more interesting and considering what’s on show more disturbing. This attempt to ‘get inside’ becomes ever more explicit through glimpses of surgery, through various denominations of sex to the bilious epicurean penultimate act. Most disturbing and challenging of all is the treatment of Tess - character, sex object and innocent: filmed by Rickard, fucked by Gecko and playmate of Eric. Quite what a feminist reading of this film would elicit would be interesting.
Moodysson at the introduction of the London Film Festival screening of A Hole in My Heart implored his audience not to judge his work immediately but to carry it and ponder it until some such future date. A reviewer has a deadline even for sprawling monstrosities as shattering and as hard to cope with as this one. Supposedly a film about love within a shell of hardcore hate, the chances are you won’t like this work but you will be enthralled by it.
