The first rule of “Manodrome” is that there is no talk of “Fight Club”. “Fight Club” looms large in writer-director John Trengrove's disturbing second feature, even if no one overtly mentions David Fincher's provocative late '90s film in this dark psychological thriller with social criticism, which finds that the state of masculinity is even more fraught than Fincher was a quarter of a century ago. Trengrove, who is gay and hails from South Africa (his 2017 debut,
“The Wound,” was shortlisted for the international Oscar), brings a queer sensibility to his otherwise unsatisfying analysis of contemporary masculinity, enlisting Jesse Eisenberg to play another skinny guy. white man seeking a way out of deep wells of festering aggression.
Director:John Trengove
Writer:John Trengove
Stars: Jesse Eisenberg, Adrien Brody, Odessa Young
Here, he finds himself in a secret society of like-minded guys, headed by Adrien Brody as a self-proclaimed father figure who calls himself "Daddy Dan" and who teaches Eisenberg's character, Ralphie, how to "be a man." In what seems like a case of lazy casting, “Manodrome” finds its once-clumsy star back in “The Art of Self-Defense” mode, embodying another variation on his now-familiar stunted man-child character. repressed. – Only this time, Eisenberg has lifted weights, bulking out like he's never done before.
Ralphie spends a lot of energy exercising. For him, the gym is like a microcosm of the world at large. It's worth noting that the only woman seen in this space, the bodybuilder at the front desk, is five times thinner than Ralphie. Obviously uncomfortable in his own skin, he stares at a muscular black man doing curls at the neighboring station, or cowers in an empty corner of the locker room. If you can guess where these behaviors are headed, then "Manodrome" isn't as sneaky as Trengrove thinks it is. The director set out to shock and surprise, but the twists simply seem manipulated to reinforce his own views on toxic masculinity.
“Manodrome” has more than a few parallels to the divisive Sundance entry “Magazine Dreams” (all of these films date back to “Taxi Driver”). It's a genre that changes along with society's expectations of its men, and yet without voiceover narration, these repressed characters can often seem frustratingly inscrutable. Outside of the gym, Ralphie works as an Uber driver, which is a constant source of humiliation, such as when a young mother breastfeeding her baby in the back seat asks him to stop when she catches Ralphie looking at her in the mirror. rearview. Was he being lewd, curious or what? The character's inner life is not defined enough for the audience to interpret his inappropriate outlook.
Relatively late in the film, we learn that Ralphie was abandoned by his father, which is just one of many factors explaining the turmoil he is now experiencing. It certainly influences his willingness to accept Dan as a surrogate father, but it complicates the looming responsibility he must feel toward his unborn child. Snooping around the elegant Manodrome mansion, where other lost souls feel a sense of pseudo-familial support, Ralphie finds a gun in Dan's desk drawer (probably hidden there by Chekhov). After rejecting so many other tired genre shortcuts, it's a shame that Trengrove resorts to this one.
Ralphie will eventually break down, of course, and when he does, the scene seems didactic and unconvincing. He shoots and kills someone for exposing a dimension in him that the film never adequately establishes, and here, “Manodrome” goes from an intriguing premise to a way to manifest in the real world the kind of cult fraternities that seem to be whitewashed. brain to young men online, to a didactic lecture on what's wrong with the state of modern masculinity. Sure, there's some satisfying irony in positing that homophobia serves to mask shameful, unreconciled desire (as "The Power of Dog" did for Benedict Cumberbatch's character), but "Manodrome" doesn't make a very compelling case.
The characters feel weak, the secret society seems implausible and its goals too vague to capture the imagination. “Manodrome” taps into a deep unease at play in the world at large, but presents only the shell of an idea, focusing on a not-very-interesting character with only the most confusing of goals. The film should be very unsettling, but the dramatic tension never solidifies, despite composer Christopher Stacey's efforts to untie us by injecting discordant threads beneath mundane scenes.
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