The 'Bad Gang' in Venice; Iranian Filmmaker and the 'American Dream'

Ana Lily Amirpour, an Iranian-American filmmaker, gained recognition with her unusual film 'A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night', which participated in various festivals such as Sundance, London, and Rome. The success of this well-crafted, compact film—featuring a surreal and symbolic theme about a fictional city in Iran with an oil refinery—paved the way for this young filmmaker to create her second film with the help of the Sundance Institute; 'Bad Batch', a film starring stars like Keanu Reeves and Jim Carrey in the competition section of the Venice Film Festival. This film also does not lack in strangeness compared to the previous film: bizarre characters in an unknown time and place. A girl from the civilized world steps into a realm outside of it; a place where cannibals capture her and cut off one of her hands and one of her legs. The film clearly flows in a symbolic atmosphere and creates a world in which humanity distances itself from established human values in an anti-narrative space. This atmosphere and place are, of course, a symbol of our current world: the film divides the characters and locations of the story into two categories: the uncivilized space and the seemingly civilized space. In the uncivilized space—where the inhabitants are apparently foreigners; thus, the film aims to speak about racism and xenophobia in today's world—brutality prevails, while in the civilized space, everyone lives in a calmer environment, dances, consumes drugs, and has a ruler (played by Keanu Reeves) who seems to control everything. However, the film attempts to juxtapose the two spaces without heavily favoring the civilized space. In the civilized space known as 'Dreamland' (a nickname for America), the only thing that does not exist is 'freedom'; while it seems that people have come to 'Dreamland' to achieve freedom and do whatever they like. In Dreamland, drugs are given to citizens, and the main character of the film named Arlen—a brave girl—after consuming them, enters the uncivilized world in a dreamlike sequence and meets a man originally from Cuba, leading to a love story. The rest of the film depicts this female character's internal struggle between two worlds: the civilized world with its specific promises or a free and wild love outside the current frameworks. In the end, the woman rebels against the apparent order of Dreamland and prefers the free world with all its savagery, although it seems that the Cuban man has also changed and abandoned his savagery. However, the film fails to create these symbolic layers successfully and resembles more of an imitation of the successful film 'Mad Max', which mostly takes place in the desert with landscapes reminiscent of Western cinema, especially Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns. The filmmaker is so caught up in form and beautiful shots that she neglects the screenplay, and the film's progression—especially at the beginning and near the end—lacks almost any appeal and fails to engage the viewer. The distancing from the characters—deliberately done—is so significant that we no longer feel them and have no interest in their fate. While the film could end sooner than its current conclusion, some scenes are unnecessarily prolonged. At the same time, the symbolism—such as the use of the American flag and a puzzle of an incomplete map of America that the film's mad character wants to complete—ultimately leads nowhere and gets lost in the filmmaker's strong interest in depicting violence. The film contains several disgusting scenes that are painful to watch. While the use of violence in the previous film was mixed with a fantasy and even comedic atmosphere and had meaning; here, however, the display of gruesome details of savagery has no specific reason or logic, except perhaps the filmmaker's interest in horror cinema.