EXCISION by Richard Bates Jr.
Pauline is a sociopathic teenager, obsessed with bodies and blood (and surgery) and eager to lose her virginity. And she is the absolute protagonist of this Excision, which in 75 minutes tells everything it has to tell (THANK YOU, DIRECTOR), with a sustained pace and staging with simplicity and effectiveness a descent into the abyss of the most darkening madness.
Pauline, I was saying, is an ambiguous, controversial character, not always lovable (indeed)... but it must be said that she is also, and despite everything, a lonely girl. Or, even better, alienated. And how sometimes she makes us smile (her monologues addressed to the Eternal Father are fantastic, which are a bit reminiscent of those of Bess in The Waves of Destiny) and other times repulses us (... the scene with the deceased bird, for one) is it is undeniable that however he has his own sensitivity that is certainly wounded by the school and family context in which he lives. In fact, things aren't going well for Pauline at school, she is often the target of her classmates' ridicule but, be that as it may, she does nothing at all to improve her situation (some of her utterances are indeed memorable ^^').
Even the situation at home is not the most idyllic: the mother is an unpleasant bourgeois devoted to appearance who would like (unsuccessfully) to shape Pauline in her image and likeness, the father a spineless little man completely subservient to his wife, and her sister minor, the only human being with whom we seem to have a semblance of a relationship, is suffering from cystic fibrosis. No one, at school or in the family, seems to notice or give enough weight to the increasingly alarming and alienated behaviors of the poor protagonist, underestimating and dismissing her actions as those of a rebellious and problematic teenager. All this will take our Pauline well beyond the boundaries of reason, towards an epilogue of INDELIBLE drama and incisiveness, which left me with a sense of defeat and anguish that I will hardly forget.
SPOILER
Pauline's guttural verses (prelude to the desperate cry of awareness of what she has just done) at the moment in which her mother embraces her (first and only gesture of affection), are one of the most poignant moments of my experience as a passionate spectator of cinema.
END OF SPOILER
'In short, an unjustly underestimated and little-known gem that deserves more visibility... with the hope that in the near future other works of this genre will arrive in our beautiful country director :)
Pauline, I was saying, is an ambiguous, controversial character, not always lovable (indeed)... but it must be said that she is also, and despite everything, a lonely girl. Or, even better, alienated. And how sometimes she makes us smile (her monologues addressed to the Eternal Father are fantastic, which are a bit reminiscent of those of Bess in The Waves of Destiny) and other times repulses us (... the scene with the deceased bird, for one) is it is undeniable that however he has his own sensitivity that is certainly wounded by the school and family context in which he lives. In fact, things aren't going well for Pauline at school, she is often the target of her classmates' ridicule but, be that as it may, she does nothing at all to improve her situation (some of her utterances are indeed memorable ^^').
Even the situation at home is not the most idyllic: the mother is an unpleasant bourgeois devoted to appearance who would like (unsuccessfully) to shape Pauline in her image and likeness, the father a spineless little man completely subservient to his wife, and her sister minor, the only human being with whom we seem to have a semblance of a relationship, is suffering from cystic fibrosis. No one, at school or in the family, seems to notice or give enough weight to the increasingly alarming and alienated behaviors of the poor protagonist, underestimating and dismissing her actions as those of a rebellious and problematic teenager. All this will take our Pauline well beyond the boundaries of reason, towards an epilogue of INDELIBLE drama and incisiveness, which left me with a sense of defeat and anguish that I will hardly forget.
SPOILER
Pauline's guttural verses (prelude to the desperate cry of awareness of what she has just done) at the moment in which her mother embraces her (first and only gesture of affection), are one of the most poignant moments of my experience as a passionate spectator of cinema.
END OF SPOILER
'In short, an unjustly underestimated and little-known gem that deserves more visibility... with the hope that in the near future other works of this genre will arrive in our beautiful country director :)
