Supplier: La Birratorium
Price: €2.35
spoilers ahead
The last movie for me was 5 Frauen/5 mujeres/5 Women, which was described as "Hitchcockian". There are a lot of psychological things going on, and questions that remain unanswered, but I don't think Hitchcock would have mixed up so many questions into a single story. Well, maybe he would today. Gotta keep up with the times and all. The movie starts with four of the women going to meet their friend in her country house, and one of them kicks her man out of the car angrily. We don't see her very much during the movie. The other four arrive with their significant others and one woman almost immediately ends up sleeping with the man who got kicked out of the car. The others realize there's an affair going on and admonish her mildly. The boys go off to sail for the weekend leaving the girls to their own devices. One of them goes out to the fields and runs around screaming like a child, which the others observe wistfully, saying they would like to still do whatever they want. She also picks mushrooms from the ground and mixes them into the salad for dinner perfectly aware that they are hallucinogenic. She even offers one to the dog in jest, but doesn't give him any in the end. The women start a kind of wobbly, giggling trip and end up watching an art film while a storm builds outside. The owner of the house has been depressed and we don't quite know why; it seems like maybe somebody has died, or her relationship has failed, but she has a flashback to a rape during the trip, and that seems to be the reason for her mental state. She starts wandering around the house, thinking she heard noises and comes across a man in her painting studio. He attacks her, she screams for help, her friends come, and two of them beat the man to death with their faces painted in the vision she has of the scene. Once the man is dead they can't decide what to do. The owner of the house calls the police, but when they arrive one of her friends takes control of the situation and tells the officers it was a mistake, and they leave. She tells her friends that they are still under the influence and that will look bad if they testify. The next day a man shows up at the house and wanders onto the property. He comes across the lake and starts a naked swim. The fifth woman finally shows up, drunk, and cajoles him out of the water. Then they have spontaneous sex on the dock. She brings him to the house to meet her friends, who are understandably suspicious of a stranger just showing up out of nowhere. Her behavior seems frivolous and stupid, knowing what we know happened, but the day before they all probably would have behaved the same way. The man says he's looking for his brother and after some back and forth between the friends, the owner offers him the caretaker's cottage for a night or two. The fifth friends lets it be known that she knows about the affair between her man and her friend, and in the end she just leaves after finding out about the killing. The four remaining friends think about how to get rid of the body and how to entertain the brother. Two of the friends take the corpse off to a reservoir to sink it and the owner decides to sleep with the man on her property. The corpse won't sink and the woman can't allow herself to sleep with the man, because she thinks she sees the tattoo of her rapist on his back. He actually has no tattoos, but her belief in his guilt for her situation gives her strength. The next morning she tells him to leave, threatening him with a knife. He goes back to his car, stuck in the mountain. The women who can't get rid of the corpse come back to the house and on the way come across a police roadblock. They police say they are looking for two troublemakers. The women find the stranger's bag with rope and some kind of projectile weapon in the caretaker's house after he leaves. They go up to his car and insist he leave immediately, but end up shooting him in the head with the projectile. At the end of the weekend, the women leave the house, probably for the last time. The police are very happy to find the two criminals, since the body has been left in the back of the stranger's car. The owner of the house burns all her paintings, gets in her truck, and drives off, possibly without the dog. And that's the end.
At one point, one of the women says they all met in an art class for children with problems, but the problems they had are never elaborated on. The woman having an affair and the woman who shoos off the police seem to be pretty cold-blooded and end the weekend with a stronger relationship than before. The woman who collected the mushrooms has a scene where she sings about burning everything and killing everybody. The fifth woman seems to have a problem with alcohol, and the owner of the house is unsociable and possibly paranoid. It is implied that the two men are criminals, since the police are happy to find their bodies, but we never find out what crime they are accused of. They might not even have been violent. The man who gets killed seems to attack the woman, but she might have attacked him first, out of fear. Then he would only be trying to subdue her and defend himself. The "brother" (we don't know for sure if they are) swims naked in the lake and we can see that he has no tattoos anywhere on his torso, so the image the owner of the house sees must be a hallucination. It's a movie that raises questions about the limits of friendship, the obligations to our loved ones, and our connection to reality. I found it interesting, even without resolution of most of the questions raised.
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