Many others have commented on this "homage" to all satires of a political bent and its hodge-podge of referenced dictators, and I can only agree. Pol Pot, Hess, Mussolini, Caligula, Winston Smith, they're all here, filtered through a film school montage of techniques and borrowings. It's all very unsatisfactory, character motivations are opaque and inconsistent, and the tone is uneven, uncertain if it is satirical comedy or mockumentary expose.
The ostensible message identified by other reviewers of the movie - that all resistance to tyrants by ordinary people is futile - is, however, less clear to me. Yhe very fragmented nature of the final ten minutes or so seems not to have been commented on either here or in professional reviews. To write it off as a descent into madness, as it has been, seems to ignore a certain poignancy and trickiness of the closing scene, where the daughter leaves her father in a flat on a council estate (looking like somewhere in South London), gets into the lift and weeps. Are we meant to conclude that everything that has gone before is the delusion of a madman, typing his story endlessly to the exclusion of the real? Or that the hypercoloured parody of the bulk of the film is a metaphor for the life that we Winstons live in apparent freedom but actual oppression? A block of flats, uniform, utilitarian, where people try and make a life for themselves lacks the drama of a North Korea or Cambodia, and the censorship and mental poverty may be invisible to us since we are not starving or sent to re-education camps or explicitly tortured. Maybe I am being too generous to this very flawed film, but the ending has left me with many questions than anything else in the movie, since it seems to require us to go back and look again at the rest of the movie. Are we so remote from this exaggerated, fictional country? Is it just a matter of degree?
The ostensible message identified by other reviewers of the movie - that all resistance to tyrants by ordinary people is futile - is, however, less clear to me. Yhe very fragmented nature of the final ten minutes or so seems not to have been commented on either here or in professional reviews. To write it off as a descent into madness, as it has been, seems to ignore a certain poignancy and trickiness of the closing scene, where the daughter leaves her father in a flat on a council estate (looking like somewhere in South London), gets into the lift and weeps. Are we meant to conclude that everything that has gone before is the delusion of a madman, typing his story endlessly to the exclusion of the real? Or that the hypercoloured parody of the bulk of the film is a metaphor for the life that we Winstons live in apparent freedom but actual oppression? A block of flats, uniform, utilitarian, where people try and make a life for themselves lacks the drama of a North Korea or Cambodia, and the censorship and mental poverty may be invisible to us since we are not starving or sent to re-education camps or explicitly tortured. Maybe I am being too generous to this very flawed film, but the ending has left me with many questions than anything else in the movie, since it seems to require us to go back and look again at the rest of the movie. Are we so remote from this exaggerated, fictional country? Is it just a matter of degree?