Hollywood actors Jesse Eisenberg and Adrien Brody star as American males caught up in a world disaster of masculinity in “Manodrome”, which premiered Saturday on the Berlin movie competition.
The thriller by South African director John Trengrove is likely one of the most keenly awaited of the 19 options vying for the occasion’s Golden Bear high prize, to be awarded February 25 by jury president Kristen Stewart.
“Manodrome” options Brody as “Dad Dan”, a cult chief who persuades determined males, usually losers of U.S. capitalism, to chop the ties with the ladies of their lives.
Eisenberg, who turned well-known enjoying Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network”, is sort of unrecognizable as pumped-up passion bodybuilder Ralphie.
When he loses his manufacturing unit job and runs into bother supporting himself and his pregnant girlfriend, Ralphie succumbs to Dan’s pitch to affix the “Manodrome” — an all-male house at his residence.
Trengrove, who made a splash in 2017 with the male initiation film “The Ritual” and describes himself as queer, stated such males’s teams have been working rampant round a world he stated was “underfathered”.
“I think a big crisis that we face now is men… don’t learn or acquire basic life skills, how to deal with feelings and emotions,” he instructed reporters. “You have grown men in the world who have the internal resources of little boys, and then have to hide that and overcompensate with hyperaggression.”
Dan fatefully provides Ralphie a handgun to make him really feel much less susceptible, which Eisenberg stated was a typical response to emotions of insecurity in America, the place mass shootings are incessantly carried out by remoted males.
“As an American reading a script about this kind of spiralling based on dangerous ideas about masculinity, it seemed like a very logical progression into gun violence,” he stated.
“But I suppose because this is an international audience” on the competition, he stated, “it will play as something particularly American.”
Brody, who gained an Oscar for his position in Roman Polanski’s Holocaust drama “The Pianist”, stated that males have been usually offered, each on-line and in the true world, a distorting and harmful picture of how they need to be.
“Beyond grappling with masculinity or very blatant issues within society as a whole, (the film) is really about the disconnect with what we intrinsically know as the truth and what we are bombarded with, which becomes the truth,” he stated.
“All of our collective doubts and past traumas and unresolved issues” create “these fractured lives throughout the world –-the repercussions are endless”, he added.
Trengrove stated he wished to discover the “shame and impotence” of males struggling within the U.S. economic system.
“I’m generally just interested in the class struggle and how people are products of their socioeconomic background,” he stated. “It sometimes feels to me that American films can kind of resist talking about those things.”
The Berlin movie competition runs till February 26.
© 2023 AFP