South African director John Trengove’s Berlinale competition title doesn’t seem like an obvious choice to set during the festive period.
Manodrome sees Jesse Eisenberg playing a troubled taxi driver who finds himself becoming lured into a mysterious and cult-like ‘family’ of men.
“It’s a strange kind of Christmas movie, in a way,” said Trengove, while discussing the film with cast members including Eisenberg and Adrien Brody at the Berlinale.
“That was very much intentional. I wrote the first draft of the screenplay over Christmas. There was something about the perversity of bringing these dark themes into this supposedly festive but very problematic ritual, that’s so saturated in consumerism, and in a way has lost a lot of meaning.”
The feature, which is The Wound filmmaker’s English-language debut, is produced by Riley Keough with Gina Gammell and Ryan Zacarias through Felix Culpa, alongside Ben Giladi. Capstone Global represents international sales and CAA represents the US sale. The idea for the film came to Trengrove after learning about the so-called ‘manosphere’ – a collection of websites and online forums that promote masculinity and misogyny.
“[The film became this idea of a character who immerses himself in a world of men, and that blurs the lines between camaraderie and sexuality, and leads to all sorts of madness. A fever dream.”
But for Trengove, it was important to not let his film veer into becoming a comment on the alt right or internet culture, and to distance his film from any perceived similarities to the case of Andrew Tate, the British-American social media personality and proud misogynist, recently arrested in Romania on suspicion of human trafficking.
“I only found out about Andrew Tate very recently. The kernel of the idea precedes him,” said Trengove. “Early on I was very clear I didn’t want to make a film about the internet, even though we were drawing a lot of ideas about that world. We wanted to make something a little more imagined and ‘other’. I deliberately resisted that topicality knowing it was already in a triggering and immediate space. There’s no direct correlation with Andrew Tate – and thank God for that.”
Gun violence
Actor Brody was keen to highlight the film’s commentary on gun violence in the United States. “We’re afflicted by a gun, violent epidemic,” he says. “It feels like a natural progression, where there’s unchecked aggression within an individual that is being harnessed and stemming from myriad insecurities. Violence, and lashing out in some form of violence, seems logical. Guns are readily available, not exclusively in America, but we do have access to weapons, and they are used.”
Trengove wanted this aggression to infiltrate a domestic space in his film, and look at “how radical ideology reaches the mainstream. I think we see this in American politics, housewives in the Midwest are suddenly picking up assault rifles and reading up on neo-Nazi ideology.
“The idea that that kind of radical ideology, and extreme ideas about masculinity, could somehow find a softer, domestic space, I thought was interesting.”
No comments yet