Carnage (2011) - film review

In a public park, two eleven-year-old boys get into a fight in which they both get badly injured.  Naturally, the parents of each child consider that their little treasure is the victim of a malicious assault.  When the parents confront one another, what begins as a mild dispute rapidly escalates into something far more serious.  Who knows where the ensuring carnage will end...

Carnage may be a variation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf for the 21st century. The meeting of two New York middle class couples in the apartment of one of them, to discuss a violent quarrel between their children, becomes a tragicomic confrontation of the couples with themselves, and of each one with the other. The politically correct, the good manners, the restraint, and the obliged courtesy are soon exploited by the guests, and the four characters begin to behave like savages in the jungle.

A tragicomic air envelops their actions and makes evident the spiritual emptiness of them all, who try to calm their fury or increase it with whisky, cigars and cakes.   They all are prisoners of the objects.  The first accident is produced by a stick, the following ones are settled using a bucket, a hairdryer, coca-cola, perfume. The lawyer, for instance, is largely dependent of his mobile phone, his life is in it.  The livingroom becomes a battlefield, where there are continually repeated verbal attacks and truces.  The camera leaps roughly from one character to the other or halts, framing the human quartet in desperate postures: males caring always for their image, women losing it involuntarily.

As in Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, the visitors can’t leave the place.  They need to return to the apartment, because they are compelled to renew the fight, over and over again.  One of their disputes goes round the uncivilized treatment that the house’s owner gave to the hamster they had taken care of and which has been finally released into the street. We will see at the end of the picture, the animal happily eating in the park, near the two reconciled children. This film is a minor piece among Polanski’s; it is based on a play by Yasmina Reza, and does not dissimulate its theatrical characteristics.

© Adam Gai (Israel) 2011

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