9 Souls (2003) vs. Utopia (1983)

[Curtis, baby]

9 Souls (Toshiaki Toyoda, 2003) vs. Utopia (Sohrab Shahid-Saless, 1983)

Vote for either x2003 or x1983 (italicization unnecessary).

The deadline for voting is 12 a.m. EST on Saturday, June 29.

If you need access to the films, please let us know.

[mesnalty]

x2003

Utopia's been on my watchlist for a while, as I've enjoyed Shahid Saless's 70s films, and this one's got an impressive status as one of the most beloved films on Letterboxd - below only Out 1 on one of those lists of little-seen but highly rated films. And it's easy to see why; it's well-made, with an all-enveloping atmosphere of dread and gloom. But I like a little respite from the gloom, or at least some suggestion of what the gloom might contrast with.

I've seen Utopia described as a film about how capitalism destroys the possibility of authentic love. It's a reading I can understand, with the pimp standing in for Capital, but the problem is that I don't get any sense of the alternatives, of the not-yet-deterritorialized flows of desire, as Deleuze and Guattari might put it. The transactions with men other than our main villain are uniformly, well, transactional, devoid of any of the variety you might expect to find in a 3-hour movie. And so are our protagonists' outside lives, if the little we hear about them is any indication. That "Let's go to work" at the end does offer a possibility of anti-capitalist collective action, but for me, it's too little, too late.

This is all by design, I'm sure, but I was reminded of Fernandez's Salon Mexico, which I watched for the '49 poll around the same time as this. That movie's got a standard guy-tries-to-save-the-girl-from-prostitution plot; at one point he something like "You're a treasure, and a treasure is a treasure even if it's in the trash." And it's hard to object too much to so un-nuanced a portrayal of sex work in a 40s film, since there are hundreds of movies with the same ideology from that era. But I was hoping for a little more from a 1983 film.

9 Souls isn't the sort of film I generally like. The first 15 minutes didn't give me much hope, with that early-2000s faux-punk aesthetic that I generally find obnoxious. And not everything about it works for me, but it did manage to achieve some genuine feeling.

[Lencho of the Apes]

I have a wee problem with Utopia, stopping for a rest at the halfway point... In tandem with anything else that you can understand from the movie, I also hear the voice of a Muslim apologist, saying something like "women have to deal with *this* in the West, and they call *us* anti-feminist?"

[john ryan]

x2003 by a hair

[Curtis, baby]

Voting closed! 2003 wins!