Roman Polanski
Carnage

Four adults, locked in an elegant New York apartment; two upper-middle-class couples trying to sort out the troubles caused by their children. It seems like a comedy film, but it's not. It seems like a comedy, but it is not at all a comedy. It even seems like a light film, but you leave the cinema with a sense of heaviness both in your head and in your stomach. Because Polanski's latest film, even though it makes us laugh the whole time, is a chilling, ruthless, cold, and maniacal reflection on our culture, on the "democratic and free" Western world. And even though we see international stars on the screen (all good, an Oscar to all four), we suddenly feel like unaware protagonists, actors without knowing it: it is our life that Polanski tells, it is our anxieties, our fears, our needs, and our obsessions. There is something for everyone: the failure of the traditional family model, the lack of communication between young people and adults, the most vile and obnoxious racism, the exacerbated machismo, the violence towards animals, the slavery of technology that makes us live glued to a cell phone, the pettiness of Western capitalism, represented by a ruthless businessman who doesn’t care if the drug he sells is harmful to the health of those who use it.

We laugh, and we laugh a lot too. But they are bitter laughs, laughs that make us understand how sometimes we manage to joke about those things that political correctness forces us to keep silent. And it seems strange, but we burst out laughing precisely on these delicate aspects, almost as if the film were an Anthem to freedom and carefreeness: we laugh when the husband of the whiny Jodie Foster defines her activism for human rights as "bullshit for niggers," we laugh when we learn that the name of the couple’s hamster is "for fags," we laugh when the brilliant Kate Winslet throws up on the art magazines scattered on the coffee table.

Polanski destroys every convention and throws four human beings into a vicious circle that starts as excessively democratic and steeped in fair play but is soon destroyed and overturned, reaching, progressively faster, the most ridiculous conditions: drunk, tired, and depressed by their own lives.

Written by four hands together with Yasmina Reza (the film is based on the play "The God of Carnage" by Reza herself), "Carnage" demonstrates the skill of the versatile Polish director in dissecting the deepest feelings, sensations, and emotions of our nature. Had it lasted a quarter of an hour longer, it would have been a perfect masterpiece, given that its ending leaves everything a bit up in the air, too much in suspense. But anyway watching the film feels like watching a little documentary about ourselves, so we all know the ending even if it's not shown.