The ostensible plot of this sloppily-constructed film eludes one's grasp, as the viewer is bombarded by murky symbols, and flashbacks or flashforwards that send one scrambling for the VCR rewind button.
Intent on exposing Neo-Nazis, writer Martin (Hugh Grant) boards a train for Venice with his top-secret computer disks. He doesn't realize that a group of skinheads--including Udo (Robinson Reichel) who viciously beats up the passenger he replaces--has stowed away on the train. The skinheads seek
Martin's heavily-researched tome at the behest of the manipulative Stranger (Malcolm McDowell).
The Stranger is furious at ballerina Tatjana (Evelyn Opela) for spilling incriminating gossip, and is solicitous of American actress Vera (Tahnee Welch) whom he may have molested when she was a child. Ironically, Vera's daughter Pia disappears on the train and is eventually found and returned to
her mother by the sinister Stranger. When the hate-mongers surface, Udo terrorizes Martin in his compartment, and the others murder an attendant before turning on Udo for showing a weaker side. Despite hallucinating on drugged champagne, Martin and his computer disks survive the ride to Venice in
time for carnival.
Tricked into visiting Inferno Publishers (an abandoned building), Martin barely bicycles away from stormtroopers and deadly Dobermans before crashing his bike and succumbing to amnesia. One year later, memory-fogged Martin is nursed by Vera as the skinheads besmirch the democratic landscape. By
rescuing Pia from a tumble off a high apartment ledge, angst-wracked Martin symbolically saves the innocence of the free world.
One of the wooziest bad films of the past decade, this muddled would-be art movie is harder to see through than obsidian. Fracturing the temporal cinematic syntax only worsens our confusion as the viewer is hurtled in one scene from Vera's childhood trauma in flashback to Pia's precarious
ledge-tottering in a flashforward. Most egregiously, this trivialization of anti-Semitic terrorism is so poorly constructed that instead of climaxing its terror trip at the end of the train ride, the film drags out its pinheaded scenario for another year of fancy-schmancy theorizing in Carnival
City. And since the Aryan thugs are directed to behave like stars of a high school production of CLOCKWORK ORANGE, there's no heft to their sadistic sallies.
The movie is riddled with a succession of seemingly random images that masquerade as a storyline. It's difficult to decipher whether: (1.) sexual abuse survivor Vera is a symbol for the Nazi-dominated Weimar Republic; (2.) the train passengers who go on eating and drinking after skinhead outbursts
represent complacent Jews or indifferent Germans; (3.) Grant and Welch's dreamlike rendition of scenes from "Romeo and Juliet" has any signifance to the plot; and (4.) if Grant's amnesia stands for a failure of writer's conscience or some submerged collaborationist instinct.
The film can easily be categorized as another completely befuddled international co-production whose lack of thematic focus receives a perfect chaotic match-up from the cacophony supplied by a multi-nationalized cast. Post-dubbed by sound engineers in need of hearing aids, this flashy admonishment
about Nazi revivalism is like a nervous breakdown in cinematic form.(Graphic violence, sexual situations, adult situations, extreme profanity.) leave a comment