"I'm the same as always," Paul insists, but what's lost cannot be recovered, and Godard – seen as Lang's assistant director – makes Camille the film's true voice as she turns back the camera's admiration. Paul's diffidence towards the attention the looming Prokosch pays to his wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot), fractures their union, and the divide is played out in a long sequence that ranges across their apartment as the film's elegiac tracking shots are supplanted by sharp edits that emphasise architectural space and personal discord. Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) is a screenwriter being pursued by a hubristic American movie producer, Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance), to rewrite an adaptation of Homer's Odyssey that the great German filmmaker Fritz Lang (playing himself and proudly inscrutable) is shooting for him at Rome's storied Cinecitta studios. Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Sunday 3, Saturday 9, and Sunday, June 10.Ī witheringly beautiful and emotionally roiling study of various divides including art and commerce as well two people in a marriage, writer-director Jean-Luc Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard's 1963 masterpiece coolly conjures multiple commentaries. The movie is best as a study of teenage enthusiasm and exploitation, charting his association with a trio of anarchic classmates – including John Backderf (Alex Wolff), whose graphic novel memoir is the film's source text – who stoke his antisocial stunts.īrigitte Bardot in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt.ĬONTEMPT ★★★★ PG, 105 minutes. Dahmer's spectral vacancy is haunting, although the camera is sometimes cliched in how it examines him. His presence creates an extreme take on adolescent alienation, with Marc Meyers' film suggesting that he struggled with his psychiatric disorders before being overwhelmed. Fascinated by roadkill and terrified by his own sexuality, Dahmer is an outcast adrift in his Ohio high school while at home his unstable mother (Anne Heche) and weary, distant father (Dallas Roberts) battle towards divorce. Ending on the very cusp of that sustained killing spree, My Friend Dahmer is a portrait of the monster as teenager, tracking Dahmer (Ross Lynch) and his incipient needs.
#My friend dahmer movie times serial#
Cinema Nova, now screening.īetween 19 Jeffrey Dahmer, murdered, raped and dismembered 17 men and boys, establishing himself as one of the serial killers whose heinous actions established the true crime genre. But in abandoning the subjective perspective of the graphic novel, “My Friend Dahmer” feels a little lacking in purpose.MY FRIEND DAHMER ★★★ M, 103 minutes. The acting is excellent throughout, and Ross Lynch in the role of Dahmer elicits genuine sympathy for an increasingly lost but not yet monstrous soul. It’s credible in its evocation of mid-’70s suburbia. When a disturbed schoolmate cuts open his palm and drinks the blood, the others disperse, but Dahmer stands staring, transfixed.
Their mischief-making alternates with sometimes grisly scenes in which Dahmer contends with emerging obsessions. For these he is adopted, in a sense, by three other nerds. In this account, the teenage Dahmer is a withdrawn fellow who dissolves roadkill in acid in a shed behind his house and indulges in attention-getting classroom antics. In “My Friend Dahmer,” written and directed by Marc Meyers and adapted from a graphic novel memoir by Derf Backderf, that one kid is, yes, Jeffrey Dahmer, who shortly after completing his studies at an Ohio high school began his career as a sex offender, serial killer and cannibal. I recall a guy who, on the one hand, had facial hair before anybody else in his class and, on the other, wore a slide rule attached to his belt. No matter how much of a social outcast you are in high school, there’s always this one kid who’s even worse off.