Dionysos

Hiromi balancing on the thinness of her own hymen—the edge of a membrane that separates worlds that contain nothing yet exclude each other; a transparent curtain of Artemis's temple, concealing a temple treasure filled centuries ago by youth: a membrane whose true perversion lies in the '90s video aesthetic double-exposing pathetic classical music within a bittersweet plastic shell of the sounds of an incoming GSM choir and hymns of hentai vestiges of new commercial history. The voyeurism of a camera that has nothing to see: a decentering of the human perspective in a narrative revolving around an individual who has nothing to tell—only the transition of oneself from one stage to another (yet the transition itself does not imply that either stage contains anything to express), merely the surprise of the camera covering the impending monotony of adulthood. If entering adulthood means accepting the eternal principle of exchanging life and time for the nothingness of money, then the rejection of childhood signifies the discarding of a magical ring and, with it, any other content (the transitional object par excellence, the ring-object, at the center of whose materiality is emptiness). The greatest humiliation merges with the act of the greatest love of one's neighbor, where the discovery of the hidden mystery of the name of an imaginary toy, condensing within itself the lost grail of parental and child love, blends with grasping the name of the entire film: a name given by a fool, just as life is merely a story told by an idiot, filled with sound and fury that signifies nothing. All that remains is an equally foolish journey of a loop (seemingly) of a child's train through the world of adults, in which the masturbatory logic of certain individuals, seen from the previous adolescent perspective as perverse, is now elevated to a higher principle of the moral maturity of humanity, which will carry its secret for the rest of its life, keeping it in motion.

It’s like stepping into a music box and closing the lid behind you: its sentimental melody evokes a forced melancholy, yet the melodic scent of a decaying flower of kitsch in every measure reminds us that the main character has closed the lid of a coffin behind her. The uncompromising nature of our hero's chosen path is also transferred to the film, as both manage to overdose into a blissful apathy that always signifies liberation from conventional life for cinema—while society rushes somewhere, a heroin trip is a paradoxical halt that runs in all directions (the camera capturing this lethargy does not chase the usual chain of events and lingers on faces, forgetting itself, while the music, with its anesthetic tempo, slows the pulse). Just as this ecstatic leap into love for everything and everyone (regardless of gender, age, etc., with homosexual tones set against the background of operatic music and camera work reminiscent of Werner Schroeter) inevitably leads to an undeniable and logical love for death, and it is well known that death never shares with anything: mors vincit omnia. In terms of form and content, it is so (Philippe) Garrel-esque that it is almost not beautiful, yet it is beautiful.

Dehors-dedans, inside-out: an avant-garde film of its time, which, with its intimate and fragmented form, might evoke expectations of an unconsidered chaining of random scenes, something we witness in many other contemporary experimental films. However, the film has a relatively thoughtful structure defined by its title: we observe the oscillation between the closed inner space of an isolated individual and its penetration into the outer world, all within sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit parables. It is indeed a mix of intimate anti-social self-examination reminiscent of the style of Wedding Trough (1974) and leftist or Debordian studies of the society of the spectacle (saturated with disillusionment following the failure of the Western revolution of 1968), combined with anticipations of feminist films by Valie Export and others, in which characters destroy their bodies as a form of protest. In this sense, it is characteristic that these influences are directly linked in the character of the main protagonist, model Catherine Jourdan, who allows various objects of an alienating culture to penetrate her beautiful body, cut out from the advertising mythology of superficiality—as if under the skin of the spectacle—so that from the inside, a deliberately repulsive yet rebellious female vessel can expel the pus that will famously hold up a mirror to us. Given the repeated literal play of inside-out in examining what can fit into a woman's vagina, the film aspires to a retroactively found cult status (regardless of genre).