REVIEWED - A HOLE IN MY HEART/ETT HAL IM MITT HJARTA: Having tackled teenage lesbianism in Fucking Amal (aka Show Me Love) and enforced prostitution in Lilya 4-Ever, the young Swedish writer-director Lukas Moodysson sets his angry, nihilistic and sexually graphic new film almost entirely within the claustrophobic confines of a cramped apartment.
This is where Rickard (Thorsten Flinck), a dissolute middle-aged man, is shooting a porn film featuring a grungy male friend (Goran Marjanovic) and a young woman (Sanna Brading) who failed the audition for Swedish Big Brother and would like to take David Beckham to a desert island for a year, although she has more realistic ambitions in the US hardcore pornography business.
Impassively observing their drugs-and-drink-fuelled behaviour is Rickard's pallid, reclusive Goth son, Eric (Bjorn Almroth), an insecure teen who misses his deceased mother and spends most of his time alone with his collections of dolls, toys, pet earthworms and industrial music.
Moodysson's film amounts to nothing more than a grossly self-indulgent, unremittingly bleak - but curiously insubstantial - exercise. It wantonly squanders all the talent and depth evident from Moodysson's earlier movies, and it feels as distinctly unpleasant and wearisome as being harangued by an aggressive bore spewing out inarticulate pent-up rage.
The movie's reflections on the malaises of contemporary society are utterly banal and heavy-handedly expressed - basically, that men are wholly responsible for all that's wrong with the world.
So far so facile, but this vapid and ugly movie turns particularly nasty with a deliberation that is disturbing, as Moodysson seizes upon the trite maxim that nothing succeeds like excess, and he presents gratuitous scenes of urination and mouth-to-mouth vomiting, and close-up footage of labial reconstruction.
It is interesting in the context of all the recent concern and furore about the explicit depiction of consensual sex among adults in Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs that Moodysson's film so easily slipped under the radar and opens here without a murmur of protest.
