Container
Starring: Peter Lorentzon, Mariha Aberg, Jena Malone
Director: Lukas Moodysson
The film: Watching Container, it's hard to imagine that its maker was hailed as Ingmar Bergman's heir apparent as recently as five years ago. Lukas Moodysson's new outing involves neither the slightest hint of a narrative nor even dialogue and synch-sound.
The film centres around an anonymous, portly white man (Peter Lorentzon), as he dresses in drag, dabbles with his German stamps and a copy of Hello!, walks into an orgy in a dank flat in Poland, and is seen through an apocalyptic wasteland in the eerie, deserted terrain of Chernobyl. Appearing sporadically is a young, slim Asian woman (Mariha Aberg) sometimes dressed as a dominatrix and sometimes nursing the listless man's daily needs.
Above all this is a running, barely audible, voiceover (provided by US actress Jena Malone) whose words bear no apparent direct relation to the visuals. The narration shifts between a shallow female celebrity's fickle reflection on her own fame (a thought about flying to Darfur to help bring peace to the region is followed swiftly by the memory of a leery cabbie ogling her through the rear mirror) and a gay man's self-loathing and his morbid fascination with 'celebrities, different ways of torture, God and nuclear catastrophes'.