Review of Only God Forgives (2013) by Max N — 03 Oct 2013

I thought this was frequently brilliant. Zeus, the head of police, is challenged by Hera, his wife, for the control of their sons; he destroys her. This isn't realism, it's naturalism: it's about archetypes rendered into nearly credible people and situations but both approximate to the world in which we live - naturalism.

We see it every day in practically every US 'product' movie in which the father of the family saves his wife and kid from the forces of evil: it's just that 'product' embodies really simple, fanciful myths which are even more unrealistic or even naturalistic.

They're pure fantasies. This story seems to be about one of the oldest struggles of all, predating 'good' and 'evil'; the one between men and women. I see someone has mentioned castration anxiety.

Absolutely, all men in the modern part of the world have lost power relative to women. This isn't the first time. The myth of the Greek gods originally had Hera (Kristen's character) the dominant matriarch (because no one understood procreation, it was assumed that women possessed a divinely-given power to conceive which had nothing to do with mortal men).

In that scheme (around 2000BC), the male gods were a little like men in the society of the time: drones around the Queen Bee. Progressively, (getting to the time of Troy, in around 1350BC), women in society gave up their preeminence in religious and political roles to men under pressure from migrations from the Balkans.

They lost their Star Power in the hierarchy of Olympus. Hera was relegated from being Top Dog (Bitch) to something subordinate to Zeus who ruled by force (in this story, the Head of Police). I think a more revealing title would have been 'Only Zeus Forgives', with the strapline, 'But he rarely does'.

I thought Scott-Thomas was great in this film. The score was sensational. It's a kind of 'total film-making' in which all of the film's elements are tightly orchestrated to deliver the story.

The gods aren't quite human. Brad Pitt's Achilles in TROY tried for the same sense of the inhuman. Fate is brutal. The Ancient Greeks tried to dramatize it with sexual power-politics so it more closely related to their own societies.

I think that this movie is being held up to us as a slightly-distorting mirror. Really interesting, really well-done, look forward to seeing it again. Perhaps an even more interesting question is whether the filmmakers did this story wholly instinctively or if it was a conscious re-telling of a very primal psycho-drama.

..