Word: jeaned
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...police said yesterday they believe the man to be Jean Baptiste, who was convicted in 1991 for raping two Harvard summer school students...
However, this is nothing compared to the exaggerated emotion which follows. Collard shows Laura in the mids of a psychological obsession. She calls Jean 24 hours a day, leaving insane message of death, terror and suicide. Finally, Laura is carted off to the insane asylum...
Perhaps we are to assume that Collard believes Jean's quotation at the beginning of the film, "Only violence can put an end to man's ways," because we get to see plenty of violence-domestic, sexual and racial. The film attempts to achieve a fervent pitch of turbulent emotion, but is incapable to sustaining it. The goal here seems to be to achieve the numbing qualities of a "Reservoir Dogs" but ends without delving deeply enough below the emotional skin to make the audience empathize with any of the characters...
From the beginning, we see Jean's careless sexual activities, and as emotionally-charged as AIDS is, one cannot help but believe that on some level he must assume responsibility for the God-complex which leads him to play with the lives of others. Collard shows Jean having sex with random men in abandoned buildings, picking up people on the street and engaging in his fetish, being urinated on. Squeamishness is what Collard is counting on in the viewer, but the eventual emotion evoked is not pathos but repulsion...
...make any. He cannot choose between whether he wants to be a film maker or a musician he cannot decide if he wants men, women or even which ones from each of these. Responsibility, trust and some form of commitment are essential elements in any sort of relationship, but Jean is incapable of exercising any of these character traits. His overarching sense of denial seems to pervade all of his actions. And the inconsistency of the film's basic structure-its exaggeration, melodrama and useless subplots-reflects this...