Container is a close observation of a man who wants to be a woman and the love/hate relationship he has with his alter ego. Experimental cinema at its most extreme, his female side delivers an off-screen monologue over images of him living out his schizophrenic state. Lukas Moodysson’s indulgent film would be more at home in the Tate Modern.

While The Woman (Jena Malone from Saved!) delivers a self-loathing stream of consciousness, the overweight and excessively hairy Man (Peter Lorentzon) crawls around the floor of his flat on his hands and knees in an ill-fitting blond wig and a leopard print dressing gown. At one point he attaches a plastic model of a foetus to his face with cellotape; another time he tries to repair a china ornament of a dog’s head while wearing a gas mask and padded mittens.

When he licks his own image in the mirror the woman he wants to be, played by a beautiful Thai girl Mariha Åberg, joins him on screen. He carries her on his back through a forest, presumably to illustrate the burden she is to him. Other times he physically wrestles with her or they writhe around on a bed full of naked people. They aren’t having sex, just squirming in a sort of frustrated anguish.

Which is exactly what I was feeling listening to the random sentences that litter Container. “I ate asparagus for lunch”, “My skin feels like aspirin”, “I sleep like a tree,” the Voice proclaims. She wasn’t the only one either. One of the reviewers in the screening I attended was snoring.

If you ever retrace your own train of thought you might be shocked to realise how you got from wondering what to have for lunch to deciding your mother never really loved you. I’ve done it, it’s fun, and that’s what I assumed was happening here. However, The Man has much more serious problems than a mere desire for a sex change.

The Voice lists hers/his main interests as the Second World War, torture and nuclear disasters and lives in a world where Britney Spears can eat you whole. “What is the point of being gay if you’re going to be like everyone else?” she/he asks. He isn’t gay and wants to be a woman. He hates gay people and homosexuality is a cancerous tumour on society.

At this point I feel like tearing my way through the screen and dragging him down to the Gender Identity Clinic at Charing Cross Hospital. Failing that a trip to Transformation in Euston for a makeover wouldn’t do him any harm.

But he’s already in counselling, thank God, and lived as a transvestite for two years in Madrid. But did he? We don’t really know, because she/he speaks in contradictions – one minute she/he is an actress and the next the Virgin Mary – this is epitomised when the Voice says that if he were a boy he’d have sex with Paris Hilton. Surely that’s enough evidence of a deep-rooted delusional psyche.

Moodyson’s previous film, Lilya 4-ever, was a haunting masterpiece and Show Me Love is now regarded as a gay classc, and you have to admire the Swedish director’s audaciousness in even attempting to make what he calls “an autistic film”. Ultimately though he has misfired because Container is just bloody annoying.

Jena Malone’s relentless hysteria related in a deadpan incoherent monotone shows little about the real person on the screen on the brink of suicide. Grainy black and white images filmed with a jumpy camera and lack of score only goes to aggravate the irritating and intensely depressing experience. Container will drain you of any enthusiasm for life at all.

Container [2006]
Label: Metrodome
Released: 29 January 2007
ASIN: B000KB6DWS

Buy Container online and make your own min dup about this gay themed movie. Want more? Then pick up the Lukas Moodysson Presents (4 Disc Box Set) which includes the gay classic Show Me Love. Buy it online and save!