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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 16 August 2006
Some say 'puerile', some say 'sardonic' or a 'wind-up', but Manderlay is none of the above. It is an acutely achieved masterpiece and one of the most intelligent pieces of cinema of the decade.
The film is based on the paradoxes involved when one group attempts to impose philosophies on others, philosophies that are blinded to the power relationships that bind any socio-economic situation. In less jargonistic terms, it shows us the paradox when we say freedom for all yet that freedom enables consequences we don't like.
Grace sees an atrocity, in a liberal-minded spirit she attempts to solve the atrocity by bringing freedom to a colony of slaves still working a cotton plantation 80 years after abolition. She preaches values of freedom and democracy and attempts to teach the slaves in these principles, installing the institution of the referendum to all decisions affecting the cotton farm they now all partly own. Conflicts then ensue on two levels, conflicts between the use of the vote and the logical call of science (they set the clock according to the vote) and conflicts between the use of the vote and the emotions of morality, the referendums result in resolutions that Grace finds repulsive to her morality.
This conflict is a demonstration of the conflict between democracy and rights based legal systems now faced in the world's liberal democracies. When the mass-opinion does not accord with the rights based consensus, the dictatorship of the legal system trumps the demos. This is fundamentally a power relationship and Trier realises this brilliantly in Grace's 'humane' shooting of an old slave who the group had condemned to a death of suffering.
The film delves into the question of when a group can be free. When one group enslaves another and frees them, they will do so on their own terms. The intricate reality of this situation is that the new order will place a number of curtailments on the substantive freedom of individuals in the group and the group itself. The only way for the group to be free would be to hold power themselves, something that has not happened to this date in the scarred continent of America.
The 'puerile' critiques of this film tend to be a knowing snarl at what Lars was doing. Yet the critics who put them forward fail to see that he, however ironically, poses philosophical questions that rarely grace the silver screen. Not only that, but philosophical questions with a political reality deeply relevant as we see with the gross inequality in the United States, the hypocritical and sanctimonious positioning of western states to developing nations, and the deeply problematic subjectivist vs objectivist dilemmas that face our western nations in our lovely 'war on terror'.
The film is based on the paradoxes involved when one group attempts to impose philosophies on others, philosophies that are blinded to the power relationships that bind any socio-economic situation. In less jargonistic terms, it shows us the paradox when we say freedom for all yet that freedom enables consequences we don't like.
Grace sees an atrocity, in a liberal-minded spirit she attempts to solve the atrocity by bringing freedom to a colony of slaves still working a cotton plantation 80 years after abolition. She preaches values of freedom and democracy and attempts to teach the slaves in these principles, installing the institution of the referendum to all decisions affecting the cotton farm they now all partly own. Conflicts then ensue on two levels, conflicts between the use of the vote and the logical call of science (they set the clock according to the vote) and conflicts between the use of the vote and the emotions of morality, the referendums result in resolutions that Grace finds repulsive to her morality.
This conflict is a demonstration of the conflict between democracy and rights based legal systems now faced in the world's liberal democracies. When the mass-opinion does not accord with the rights based consensus, the dictatorship of the legal system trumps the demos. This is fundamentally a power relationship and Trier realises this brilliantly in Grace's 'humane' shooting of an old slave who the group had condemned to a death of suffering.
The film delves into the question of when a group can be free. When one group enslaves another and frees them, they will do so on their own terms. The intricate reality of this situation is that the new order will place a number of curtailments on the substantive freedom of individuals in the group and the group itself. The only way for the group to be free would be to hold power themselves, something that has not happened to this date in the scarred continent of America.
The 'puerile' critiques of this film tend to be a knowing snarl at what Lars was doing. Yet the critics who put them forward fail to see that he, however ironically, poses philosophical questions that rarely grace the silver screen. Not only that, but philosophical questions with a political reality deeply relevant as we see with the gross inequality in the United States, the hypocritical and sanctimonious positioning of western states to developing nations, and the deeply problematic subjectivist vs objectivist dilemmas that face our western nations in our lovely 'war on terror'.
