At a crossroads at the beginning of his career, Swedish director, Lukas Moodysson, considered alternative paths as a lawyer and a chef. By the age of 23, he had already published five volumes of poetry and a novel. Film-making was perhaps just a shadow on his consciousness at this point, waiting to emerge into the light at a later stage. Thankfully, this process of self-realization did not take too long; Moodysson himself has subsequently admitted that, although cookery might have distracted him from his true calling for a year or two, he would always have moved towards film eventually. However, this protean quality has been transferred to his directorial career; his latest film, Container, defies facile description and explores his concerns in a form that he has only hinted at in earlier efforts.

The film, shot in discomfiting black and white 35mm and kept in motion for 74 intense minutes, begins with the sound of heavy breathing, but borne of anxiety rather than lasciviousness (sometimes confusingly close bedfellows in Moodysson’s world). It is the voice of young American actress, Jena Malone, who has featured in several international box-office successes, such as Donnie Darko and Cold Mountain. Her monologue keeps us company for the duration of the film, moving immethodically from Malone’s real-life persona, through others that seem connected to the on-screen characters – the rotund Swedish actor, Peter Lorentzen, and the contrastingly lithe Mariha Ahlberg, a dancer making her acting debut. As the two characters move around different settings, mostly inside, and all claustrophobic, we begin to see strands of coherence in the confusion, as male and female personae embrace and conflict, simultaneously attempting to absorb and reject one another.

Moodysson is capable of moments of genuine humour, but seems in some of his films to see that as an indulgence that he cannot allow himself; in Container, even these moments, such as the sight of the rotund Lorentzen in blonde wig and womens’ clothes, while the narrator discusses the gorgeousness of her own femininity, are undercut with a harsh, almost bitter pathos, as the contrast between fantasy and the conviction of an identity that physical form cannot permit becomes clear. Bathtubs, dolls, ravioli, various items of clothing, and two very different bodies are mixed before our eyes, and the concoction threaten to overwhelm.

On first viewing, it is difficult to accept that the same directorial hand that brought us Together (2000), detailing the conflicts of life in a Stockholm commune in the mid-70s, also gave life to this latest offering, but looking at Moodysson’s work from that point, following his equally warm-hearted debut feature, Show Me Love (1998), it is possible to trace a conceptual progression and through this better understand the miasmic imagery that Container throws before us. The grim, but intelligent and moving depiction of a young Russian girl’s descent into the European sex-slave trade, Lilya 4-ever (2002), awakens us to the fact that Moodysson is by nature a confrontational director, not content merely to serve up comfortingly wry social commentary. The disturbing follow-up to this, A Hole In My Heart (2004), the enervating tale of a father who is shooting a pornographic film with a friend of his and a 21-year-old woman while his reclusive teenage son listens through his bedroom walls, interspersed with gory shots of plastic and open-heart surgery, was the visual precursor to Container. In Lilya 4-ever and A Hole In My Heart, the distorting and suffocating pressure of dysfunction swells behind the thin façade of domesticity and begins to burst through in the form of violence. The seemingly random physical activity in Container is actually a refinement of the orgiastic scenes of A Hole In My Heart, and the former becomes a symbolist representation of the themes that run through all the films: the desire to escape alienation and rejection through union with others, and despair at rejection and apparent incompatibility; self-dissatisfaction and hatred; confusion of identity and the blurring of sexual orientation/gender and the desire to hide that in a joint or collective ideal.

What Moodysson’s films have in common, and what makes him remarkable as a director, is the maintenance of an underlying compassion in the narrative angle that we are privileged as the audience to see, without sacrificing any of the graphic harshness in the depiction of man’s inhumanity to man – or, more frequently, to woman. Although Moodysson’s earlier works are broadly from the same cinematic perspective as the Danish Dogme95 movement (and he has collaborated with Dogme founder, Lars von Trier on shorter projects), and examine similar themes as those films, Moodysson does not indulge lightly in that examination, nor does he exploit his cast for over-elaborate performances that threaten to undermine the ideological structure of the piece, a criticism that could be levelled at such well-known earlier Dogme efforts as Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen or von Trier’s The Idiots (both 1998), although A Hole in My Heart sails close to the wind in that respect. Container challenges us to engage with these same ideas in a pure, almost abstract form, away from the reassuring, but constraining tenets of cinematic convention. It’s far from a popcorn-seller, and one suspects that Moodysson will have anticipated the extension of his sabbatical from box-office success, but this film suggests that, once he assumes another shape that interests him, people will find good reason to return to his work and see Container as a worthwhile exercise in context.

by Tom Scruton