(Movie) The Chumscrubber directed by Arie Posin

A film about the steadily increasingly disconnect in urbania, a style of movies most people associate with films like American Beauty. But if American Beauty was brutal poetry, Chumscrubber is more psychological in nature with huge doses of black humour.

A suicide occurs. The tragedy, you realize, is that no-one knows why, even till the very end. It was just one person less. The few who care are confronted with a Kafkaesque world where everyone seems dysfunctional and ‘normal’ emotions themselves seem to be twisted around itself, with the result that normal emotions seem grotesque to us and to people in the movie. The people who care are left to deal with their own demons, in their own stumbling ways. The way Glenn Close does this is beautifully shown – frightening and maddening at first, only to become very poignant at the end, when her behaviour makes perfect sense.

In the meantime, a kidnapping takes place and someone has to give the kidnappers something that is present in the dead boy’s room. One thing leads to another and the kidnapping almost goes terribly bad.

The ending was positive though, unlike American Beauty but it suits the movie, since there is an undercurrent of dark flippancy to the movie. I particularly liked the part at the end when Dean (Jamie Bell) talks to Glenn Close, when they are left all alone, when the whole madness of the world seemed to have poured out onto the street. That was the scene that made the movie memorable for me. It was as if we become truly human only when confronted with a deep personal tragedy that only very few understand. It was also the part of the movie that made the whole thing make sense.

A movie that will not fail to affect the viewer, not least because so many elements in it don’t make perfect sense at one go – only to slowly fall in place later, which for me is a sure sign of a great movie The movie sure stays with you for a long time…

Labels: movies, satire

posted by Protik Basu @ 8:50 PM