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Smelly and bad punk portrait

Her smell
Regissør: Alex Ross Perry
(USA)

STAR SLOT / Even if you have never liked punk, you should still bring along this tender and painfully riveting epic from a rough girl band environment from the US 90.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

With Her smell Alex Ross Perry challenges and stretches the limit of how disgusting an artist portrait can be. The front character in the band Something She, Becky (Elizabeth Moss), chops wild and damn violent around him. Her path from the stellar to the downfall is inevitable and tough, and terribly painful for anyone who comes near her. Elizabeth Moss, known from among other things the TV series The Handmaid's Tale, Becky gestures so you feel the sweaty anguish in her hands and the splashes of her erratic and raw mental illness. The movie uses rock star stereotypes in the crowd but at the same time quickly creeps under the skin.

Brutal and evil

Moss is surprisingly compelling in the role of violent and attention-seeking punk rock diva. With Moss' stellar status as an interpreter of complex and empathetic women's roles, I first doubted if she could manage to be so hideously brutal and evil.

The film challenges the conventions – not only in how awful the protagonist can be, but also in the choice of form and grip. Perry has deliberately kept it more improvised, also via a loosely structured narrative. The film is divided into five acts, where brief home video clips illuminate the relationship between the gangs and the alienation of their own success: An uncertain and clumsy celebration of record sales ends with a broken glass table and smashed framing of the silver trophy. Crispy, the band mates leave the record producer's office. Nothing is sacred, everything is under attack.

As in Brady Corbett's movie Vox Lux it is about a dysfunctional and destructive woman who is at the top of the food chain in the music industry. There Vox Lux wraps up the story nicely and more dramaturgically, rates Her smell on a colorful and authentic environmental depiction of the habitat of the boundless anti-heroine Becky Something. The destructive artist portrait and the theme of the film are brought to light by the debate about our relationship with artwork by abusers. Should we renounce great art because of the creators' iniquities?

The artist myth is dissected and drawn in length by Ross. I regard this blurring and smearing of the various scenes of physical and mental abuse as the director's unconscious distrust of his own theme.

undertow

Her smell
Director Alex Ross Perry

Becky is portrayed as we are used to seeing the male acting genius portrayed – and more. Despite the home video style, I perceive a literary approach to the material: on the one hand as a cinematic opposite to Joyce's stream of consciousness, on the other the film scolds the theatre's great classics: In her paranoid insecurity, Becky pulls everything and everyone with her in the aggressive suicide she herself is an epicenter for, and as a female Macbeth, she fights mostly with her own demons while also plunging her kingdom right into the abyss. Around her she has a court consisting of musical rivals and subjects who are all terrified of her pleasures, but at the same time dependent on her favor and status. As with Shakespeare, actions become fateful, and Moss and Perry turn it on so powerfully that it becomes unbearable to watch. Still, I can't help it. This churning, snarling, spewing monster is also a seductive and creative human being that is constantly bursting into its vulnerability. Becky is also unmistakably similar to artist Courtney Love, without the director admitting that Love has been the inspiration.

Becky's intense distrust and inability to relate to her own child makes her feel more male than female archetype. At the same time, it is later in the relationship with her daughter that her genuine musical performance and ability to interpret can flourish.

This movie about two girl punk bands and their turbulent lives is a bit like tearing off an old patch: It hurts, lots of smelly pussies come out, but it's also cleansing.



Her smell vises under the Oslo Pix 3-9. June.
It is streamed on Amazon (USA).

Ellen Lande
Ellen Lande
Lande is a film writer and director and a regular writer for Ny Tid.

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