Fantastic!

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Matteo Garrone's deeply morbid subjective reflection from Italy is an insightful musing of two characters, and then a third which works as an agitator. The short man finds the tall man at the zoo, where he is watching a vulture. The short guy, named Peppino, is a sweet talker. He's about 50, balding, under 5 feet tall. The tall guy, named Valerio, is a head turner, about 20, attractive, over 6 feet tall. As they struggle to recall where they've met before, the perspective periodically shifts from the humans to the vulture, a bird that survives by detecting dead meat. The picture is mangled, the sound is dampened, and we get an inverted look of the bird blinking its eyes. Valerio says animals are his strongest interest. Funny, says Peppino, they're also his. He is a taxidermist.Peppino, with a light manner and a genial grin, is a beast of prey who likes to entice young men with his money and favors. Valerio, who is told extraordinary things about his Adonis-like looks, is not very smart, and likes to be charmed. Peppino works by artifice, taking Valerio to clubs and hiring hookers for parties; the two friends end up in bed with the girls, and Valerio doesn't see that for Peppino, the girls are the snare and he is the sitting duck.The Embalmer is adept at camouflaging its real essence and rattling us with the shifts of the plot. Among the movie's charades are not all overstated, but eerily implicit. Does Peppino see himself as a homosexual, or as a philanderer who likes good buddies and is open-minded in bed? Does Valerio know Peppino wants him? Does Valerio favor Peppino's money or Deborah's abundant sexual skill? Is Valerio totally retarded? Twice he infuriates Deborah by standing her up; he continues go along with Peppino's insistence upon just one more time. Is it a defect or an advantage of the film that we don't always know what occurs? Another intended question I think, as we ponder over Valerio, a babe in the woods who, when he's not with the one he loves, loves the one he's with, if he loves at all.This incredibly unsettling and implacable experience takes place largely in Italian beach towns, but in a gray season, against chilled, steeled skies. The sea is nonetheless far away and dejected, and Garrone's images bleed the life out of some scenes. The music is a sobbing, deeply haunting jazz abstraction. This is not a comedy or a sexploitation pic, but a prurient matter concerning two obsessed pursuants and their prey, whose physicality may have made life such a breeze for him that he never got the dexterity to live it.It may sound absurd that a balding old midget could seduce an apparently heterosexual young Apollo out of the arms of an insatiable woman, but after Deborah checks Peppino out, she knows she has to take him seriously. What the short man wants, he goes after with skill, guile…and desperate longing. And it's compelling to watch him maneuver.

From beginning to end, the artful use of cinematography is exact. The director conveys the emotion through the use of scenery, "natural" lighting, or lack thereof, and the soundtrack.The production team and cast did a great job of taking words on paper and creating an original, thought evoking film that has no real category. A sort of twisted love story with a rather unexpected ending, where you are compelled to see what happens next by a feeling of expectation and suspense, not knowing when some major event will happen and actually being surprised when they do.The actors do a great job of conveying the emotions, thoughts, and tensions in every scene, especially Ernesto Mahieux and Valerio Foglia Manzillo.Unlike many subtitled films, whoever performed the English translation seems to have converted the Italian flawlessly- bravo to them.A film that is not likely to see wide distribution, and comes across as not trying to do so. More emphasis seems to be on the personal connection with each viewer, who then takes an interest in the storyline and anxiously awaits the rest of the story.Possibly a gateway film for those interested in Film Noire or who simply want to take a break from the usual with a bit "darker" film- worth the viewing charge.

Definitely not a movie for everyone. I looked for this movie immediately after seeing the most recent Garrone feature, Primo Amore (First Love) currently in the Festival circuit.The structure of the movies is non surprisingly very similar: a love story that transcends understanding and plays with common notions of relationship and sexuality, eventually trespassing into obsession. Again Garrone starts from a true story, but tries to make something universal, abstracting it from time (no modern technology) and space. The geography of the action is clear (well, at least to Italian) but the beautiful photography transforms the landscape into chiaroscuro paintings of foggy uncertainty. Ernesto Mahieux is the perfect choice for the central character-- a strong although somewhat physically stunted, madly in love protagonist.This is one movie that is difficult to classify: it's not a thriller, and very few will consider this a love story, although it borrows elements from both genres to construct something unique that gets under the skin of the spectator. Think Fellini and Lynch, but without the gratuitous weirdness. A little gem, for the few who will get it.

Matteo Garrone's `The Embalmer' (L'Imbalsamatore) evokes a troubling Diana Arbus Italy that's Fellini without the charm, Antonioni without the chic angst. (Clearly, it's just pure Garrone.) This moody, compelling film focuses (to add one more famous filmmaker name) on a Fassbinder relationship of hopeless repressed gay love. The desolate coastal spaces of the Campania region and the foggy inland environs of Cremona blend with a haunting jazz soundtrack to evoke a decade-old story of gay awakening and desperation, Patrice Chéreau's desire-ridden early film, L'Homme Blessé (1983). You can argue whether L'Imbalsamatore is film noir: it's based on a police blotter item about a deadly Roman love triangle and has gangland crime, double-crosses and a femme fatale, but Garrone has created a slow, creepy character study that leads through initially cheery but off-kilter events into more flesh-crawling developments that drift into final sudden violence. It's been called homophobic, and indeed the gay person isn't stable or admirable: he's a lonely dwarf with a hopeless concealed passion and crafty subterfuges that lead into spooky delusions. But the movie isn't so much about sexuality at all as about repressed desire and confused intentions.To bring yet another director into play in discussing this wholly original movie, the dwarf suggests David Lynch and some of the interiors and their lighting indeed suggest a southern Italian Blue Velvet.Peppino, a little fifty-ish taxidermist, finds handsome, naive young Valerio in the Naples zoo and lures him by offering an inflated salary, into giving up his job as a cook and becoming his apprentice. (Picture the extra-tall Valerio walking next to tiny squat Peppino: that's Diane Arbus.) Peppino has extra dough because he moonlights for the Mafia sewing drugs into corpses. The sweet Valerio likes learning about taxidermy and is too good natured and simple to see the hidden nature of Peppino's interest, though even Peppino's Mafia boss sees it and warns Peppino of its danger. To justify being close to Valerio in bed Peppino arranges joint orgies with call girls. That keeps Valerio out too late and his brother kicks him out of the house, so he moves in with Peppino. Peppino hides his Mafia connection as well as his attraction from Valerio, even when he takes Valerio along on a Mafia job in Cremona. While waiting for Peppino in a Cremona hotel, Valerio meets Deborah, a volatile young woman with surgically enhanced lips, and he and she trick Peppino into taking her along when they return home. For a while the three play around together and Deborah dresses Valerio in a nightgown and puts lipstick on Peppino. Eventually Valerio wants to move out and live with Deborah, who's now pregnant with their child, and that doesn't suit Peppino at all. Though Valerio remains ambivalent to the end, Peppino and Deborah grow too sour toward each other for the triangle to continue. The young couple goes off to Cremona to get jobs and live with Deborah's parents and wait for the child to be born. Peppino eventually comes after them and stalks Valerio, introducing himself to the parents as Valerio's `uncle.' Ernesto Manieux as Peppino exhibits a bottomless, maniacal charm throughout that is both smooth and menacing. Valerio Foglia Manzillo as Valerio is so tall and so athletically handsome that he seems peculiar too, especially in constant proximity to Manieux. L'Imbalsamatore is about transformation and confusion. Sometimes Peppino is seen from far below and seems gigantic. He's physically unattractive and can be creepy but he's also charming, sociable and charismatic. Valerio goes from cook to taxidermist to waiter. He is a devastating seducer or childlike waif: his powerful physique is dangerous because the brain is unfocused. He's putty in the hands of Peppino. There's something of `Mice and Men's' Lennie in him, which comes out toward the end. Peppino's diminutive stature limits him, but he manipulates what power he has with consummate skill. Right at the end, in Cremona, he lures Valerio away from Deborah, gets him drunk, and tempts him to run off – where? To Cuba or Africa; Peppino has him mesmerized into wanting to escape Cremona's landlocked fogs and go off with him almost anywhere to get away from the monkey-suit uniform he wears at a hotel, the constricting responsibilities of fatherhood, and the generally stifling bourgeois scene at Deborah's family's house, symbolized by crunching the identical piece of toast every morning across the table from her father, with the mother coming like clockwork to pour the coffee and milk from two opposing kettles.Garrone's Italy is a haunted place, drab and commonplace yet unlike any other. His scenes, which use a lot of ultra close-ups of the faces, are uniformly compelling: the dangerous tensions of the love triangle keep them focused. The various sequences in which Peppino tries to become intimate with Valerio skirt the edge between jaunty and flesh-crawly. The dialogue seems hasty, natural, improvised (unlike traditional Italian films, this has a live sound track with no post-dubbing). It gives a sense of convincing lies, mindless formulas that just get by or seem calming but cause confusion, mimicking an understanding that is not there. Background sounds are skillfully and subtly used. One has the sense of being in the hands of an exceptionally original director who knows well how to use the rituals and longeurs of Italian life to his own special storytelling ends. In the disquieting, manic final sequence Peppino wields a huge pistol, which he talks about as if it were an unmanageable, unpredictable woman. His desperation has made him deranged and dangerous but Valerio also seems to have gone very quietly and therefore more frighteningly crazy. The ending is stunning but inevitable.