Martha Marcy May Marlene

2011

Martha is a troubled young women who is trying to escape from the effects of having spent years in a Manson-like cult. She reaches out to her older sister, who is married to a successful, pretentious English architect. Their lives don't blend well. Martha dies not understand the most basic of society's conventions. She crawls into the couple's bed just as they are climaxing. She swims naked in public during daylight hours. She'd rather eat granola than Count Chocula. Her problems are compounded by the fact that she won't or can't explain to her sister how she came to be so odd. It's obvious that the sisters have never been close.

MMMM is the kind of indie film that I call "made for Sundance and Leonard Cohen songs," or that the South Park creators would call "junkie lesbians eating pudding." It has the usual humorlessness, the smugly depressing tone, and the requisite unsatisfyingly ambiguous ending, of course, but what really makes it a Sundance movie is the underlying suggestion that the older sister's luxurious upper middle class life is essentially the same individuality-destroying trap as the younger sister's cult, and would be just as hard to escape.

I think we hipsters supposed to set our joints down for a second and think "heavy, dude."

Here's Elizabeth Olsen, younger sister of the Olsen Twins, although her face and figure make her look more like a younger sister of Scarlett Johansson. That's a good thing. The previous clips were taken from a workprint. This one is supposed to be from a screener. I watched both and saw no difference between them except the size. I think this is not a screener, but simply a different digitalization of the workprint.