A Hole In My Heart (Lukas Moodysson, 2004)

Sidestepping Moodysson’s more abstract poem-film Container, mostly for the sake of adding one more film that has a narrative: this dark, chaotic, ugly gawk at amateur pornography, sick father-son dynamics and — more broadly and most interestingly — meaningless celebrity appears, at first, to be the polar opposite of the director’s warm, humane look at a hippy commune in Together. One might think two different men had made them; only, once you overlook the (real) vaginal surgery, emetophilia, and dildoes, both are really films about strange, horny families.

Lukas Moodysson reportedly first asked Christina Aguilera to play Tess, the first-time porn star: maybe he was looking for a heavier-handed way to get across his point about the exploitation that goes hand in hand with fame. (“I can’t imagine what could have turned Aguilera off about the script,” the film’s review at Slant says, dryly — “that her snatch would have gotten more screen time than her face or that she would have had to induce vomiting using a toothbrush…that is, only after sticking a dildo in her ass and Frenching a dingy bathroom floor.”) A better and more relevant example might be Britney Spears, whose bare feet in a public bathroom, irresponsibility with children, shaved head and intense outbreaks of desperate, puny violence all stemmed partly from her illness, partly from the pressures of contemporary celebrity. Moodysson ought to have filmed her Lifetime movie, in the same style.

PS