Park's Violation
That's why everything in Stoker-from time-lapse bucolic montages to India's collection of Saddle-Oxfords-is so familiar yet patently artificial. A true cineaste would understand that Shadow of a Doubt's apprehensive observation of genteel Americana doesn't match with the hysterical nihilism of American Beauty. For Park, both are equal because, like Tarantino, he is more interested in artifice than in sociological, psychological truth or cultural coherence.
Park may not be sensitive to the blather in Wentworth Miller's script ("To become an adult is to become free") that seems to be working out the same transgressive vengeance against "the family" as The Deep End and Savage Beauty but he's not a realistic director anyway. The death of the American family means less here the death of meaningful movie archetypes. Park specializes in sadistic montages, devising elaborate fantasies of torture and brutality--even when his set-ups are stylishly hokey: in a chic but shabby motel room, a country road outside a retro diner or a mother/daughter hair-brushing scene that match-dissolve into a reed-filled wilderness.
In Stoker, Park plays with ideas of nature, death, puberty, incest out of wantonness. Rather than explore Miller's cynical clichés, Park indulges his own cruel perversities. Culture-vulture Kidman gets paid-back with a doggy-style matricide in a baroque mansion. Her musical motif is "Summer Wine" by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood-inauthentic 60s camp signaling Park's Tarantino cluelessness. But it is indeed the S&M master of Old Boy and Thirst who stages India's rape memory as a shower scene-masturbation-murder-orgasm kinetic puzzle. Stoker is one long montage of art-movie clichés. Due to the death of cinephilia, perversity gets mistaken for originality.
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