by Derek Smith 4/30/07

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While The Bloody Child was released in 1996, one cannot help but, in retrospect, be reminded of Gus Van Sant’s Death Trilogy.  Much like Van Sant’s Gerry, the story here was found buried in the back of the newspaper – a remarkable event lost amongst a bevy of more “newsworthy” stories – and is centered on an almost random act of murder.  Where Van Sant’s films use the long shot to slowly, steadily march towards death, Nina Menkes is constantly dancing around it, jumping around chronologically to place quiet, everyday interactions around sudden bursts of violence and anger, or the aftermath thereof.  The murder in question is that of an American G.I. who is found in the desert in the middle of the night after murdering his young wife.  The film, however, avoids the temptation to veer into puerile psychological explanations and instead allows the act to speak for itself and, in fact, makes it all the more horrific by surrounding it with the mundane daily activities of those involved.

As interesting as the technique may sound, Menkes comes away with fairly mixed results and in refusing to delve into character psychology, doesn’t find all that much to put in its place.  Much of the dialogue is barely audible, if at all, bringing the images and various situations being portrayed to the forefront, but quite frankly, her juxtapositions of the everyday with the shocking don’t say much beyond the obvious notion that violence is as much a mundane part of life as standing around on guard or playing pool.  Personally, I’m fine with boredom as an aesthetic choice if it accomplishes something in the end, but Menkes appears to be using it here to fain profundity when essentially all that’s being done is evading the sensationalization of violence.  Yes, while people fill their cars up with gas and a horse trots around the desert, violent acts are occurring.  Sure, normal, sane, and otherwise pleasant individuals are capable of committing destructive, horrifying acts that will and can only remain unexplained.  This is all good and fine, but when the self-conscious artiness (the dead wife even quotes from Macbeth in her voice-overs for chrissakes) that enshrouds these ideas do nothing to enhance our understanding of them, it becomes an exercise in tedium and repetition that only reminds us of its central thesis without ever threatening to scratch the surface.  I hate to be the one saying a certain feature film could easily have worked as a short film, but here it really does seem like the case.  It drags things out without positing any new ideas and if there’s one thing that’ll turn people off to your film, it’s overestimating the significance of what you have to say.