Atomised
Two half-brothers abandoned by their mother in the 1960s struggle to find intimacy as adults in this German adaptation of Michel Houellebecq's controversial novel
French literary provocateur Michel Houellebecq's 1998 novel 'Atomised' was a bitter swipe at the permissiveness of the 1960s. The cost of free love, Houellebecq argued, was emotional disintegration, and we're still paying the price for the baby boomer generation's pursuit of the freedoms they believed were their right. It's a perspective German director Oskar Roehler shares. His adaptation maintains the bleak agenda of Houellebecq's novel, but what on the page was fascinating, radical and loudly opinionated here becomes unsubtle, predictable and almost comically melodramatic.
Michael (Ulman) and Bruno (Bleibtreu) are half-brothers, both of whom were abandoned by their self-seeking hippie mother Jane (Hoss) and brought up by different sets of grandparents. Michael is a quiet, reserved scientist whose field of research - asexual reproduction - stands as a handy metaphor for his own fear of emotional and physical intimacy.
Bruno is a hard-drinking, self-obsessed teacher whose wife can no longer satisfy his desire for kinky, porno sex. When he's not attempting to seduce his own pupils he writes reactionary essays on race and gender which, the film suggests, the educated middle-class secretly agree with but lack the courage to publish.
Flashbacks flesh out the boys' troubled adolescence, while, in the film's present, Michael and Bruno are approaching critical mass. Michael returns to the town in which he grew up and is reunited with childhood crush Annabelle (Potente), who gently persuades him to open up. Bruno's wife leaves him and he suffers the first of several breakdowns, but rouses himself with a trip to a new age nudist colony where he meets the similarly damaged but equally kinky Christiane (Gedeck). For a while sex clubs and swinging offer the couple a seedy sort of redemption but the schematic plot eventually damns them both for following the route taken by their parents' generation.
Michael (Ulman) and Bruno (Bleibtreu) are half-brothers, both of whom were abandoned by their self-seeking hippie mother Jane (Hoss) and brought up by different sets of grandparents. Michael is a quiet, reserved scientist whose field of research - asexual reproduction - stands as a handy metaphor for his own fear of emotional and physical intimacy.
Bruno is a hard-drinking, self-obsessed teacher whose wife can no longer satisfy his desire for kinky, porno sex. When he's not attempting to seduce his own pupils he writes reactionary essays on race and gender which, the film suggests, the educated middle-class secretly agree with but lack the courage to publish.
Flashbacks flesh out the boys' troubled adolescence, while, in the film's present, Michael and Bruno are approaching critical mass. Michael returns to the town in which he grew up and is reunited with childhood crush Annabelle (Potente), who gently persuades him to open up. Bruno's wife leaves him and he suffers the first of several breakdowns, but rouses himself with a trip to a new age nudist colony where he meets the similarly damaged but equally kinky Christiane (Gedeck). For a while sex clubs and swinging offer the couple a seedy sort of redemption but the schematic plot eventually damns them both for following the route taken by their parents' generation.
The first half benefits from some mordant wit and strong performances. Like Houellebecq, Roehler takes particular relish in satirising decadence, delusion and the selfish pursuit of sex. The film's most pointed, potent satire is directed at the tantric exploits of leathery new-agers - the spiritual kin of Bruno and Michael's mother, and a world in which Bruno finds himself as frustrated as ever. But the subsequent swerve into melodrama is so sudden and absurd that you wonder if it's intended as an elaborate parody, and the film's women suffer such outrageous misfortune that it begins to look like pure vindictiveness on the filmmakers' part.
Integral to the book was Houellebecq's disgust with what he perceived as the emptiness of modern living. His characters were shameless ciphers for his own strange strain of ascetic nihilism, but the thesis was so intriguing and the treatment so audacious that you forgave the book its indulgent tendencies and opinionated digressions; these were, in fact, a large part of its appeal.
Roehler's conventional treatment never acknowledges that, for Houellebecq, the plot is a speculative fantasy designed to illustrate his own views rather than illuminate real life. The result is a film that grants the brothers no responsibility for their behaviour - fine, but then let's not punish them for their transgressions - and which shoves them towards a conclusion that replaces Houellebecq's end-of-humanity finale with a disappointing cop-out. Without the indignant rigour of Houellebecq's prose, this attempt to ascribe the emotional paralysis of a generation to their parents' inability to keep their pants on looks petulant, predictable and fatally unconvincing.
This review originally appeared at Film4.com
Integral to the book was Houellebecq's disgust with what he perceived as the emptiness of modern living. His characters were shameless ciphers for his own strange strain of ascetic nihilism, but the thesis was so intriguing and the treatment so audacious that you forgave the book its indulgent tendencies and opinionated digressions; these were, in fact, a large part of its appeal.
Roehler's conventional treatment never acknowledges that, for Houellebecq, the plot is a speculative fantasy designed to illustrate his own views rather than illuminate real life. The result is a film that grants the brothers no responsibility for their behaviour - fine, but then let's not punish them for their transgressions - and which shoves them towards a conclusion that replaces Houellebecq's end-of-humanity finale with a disappointing cop-out. Without the indignant rigour of Houellebecq's prose, this attempt to ascribe the emotional paralysis of a generation to their parents' inability to keep their pants on looks petulant, predictable and fatally unconvincing.
This review originally appeared at Film4.com
