Castration Movie 2: The Best of Both Worlds is in pretty much every respect a better movie than its predecessor. Instead of two disparate stories of about equal length, this one is an entire uninterrupted five hour experience focusing on Circle, a woman who wants to leave a trans separatist cult located in a New York basement.
For a five hour film, there is literally one scene I think I would cut for being annoying and unnecessary, or at least rework it. This thing is tight. There is less annoying indie music that is faux-diegetic but really is just an excuse to do a little swingin' and-a dancin' for the viewer's dubious enjoyment (how very 40s Hollywood) compared to the first movie, and when it inevitably happens it feels more earned. This movie also has an incredibly important element the first does not possess: a metaphorical dimension. It is not too hard to work out the point of it all if you spend a day or two ruminating (and believe me I sure as hell have been thinking about this thing) but it's nonetheless a welcome layer, an honestly needed layer, because I must now tell you that the movie is, on its face, an absolutely disgusting, perverse exercise of never-ending psychological torture.
One should hope so, of course, given that the plot is centered around a cult, but every scene is more or less vomit-inducing, and there is no reprieve. The opening hits you really hard right out the gate. The climactic, 15 minute long, single take torture scene where Circle's incredibly arousing body gets to writhe inside a cage without hope of escape had my eyes stuck to the screen. The two ending scenes are, I think, the most disgusting shit I've ever seen put to film, precisely because they appear completely benign on the surface and even impart the illusory appearance of a happy ending to the whole story. It's just a lot.
These things are Louise Weard's, the director's, passion project, and of course I must admit I only found out about them because I noticed the poster on an IMDB sidebar, saw the absolute dogshit aesthetics of, well, the camera work, the composition and visual fidelity, it's all awful, and thought it would be interesting to watch a trash movie with a trash title and a trash runtime from a trans woman director, who, you know, well... Trans women's artistic output is kind of, on the average, trash, you know? I wanted to see some trash.
This thing has hurt me. It has a target audience, like I said about the first one you may not understand it, but if you do, I guarantee you will come to appreciate it as high art. I genuinely think it might've changed my soul in a non-trivial way, an E/N kind of way if you wanna act old Internet about it, and this is all I really need to award a piece of media the label of "art." I think you should go watch it I hope you do go do it I don't give a shit thanks and bye.
