A palindrome refers both to an inverted strand of DNA or words or phrases that read the same forward and backward. With his misguided, attention-grabbing latest, Palindromes, Todd Solondz has made a film that applies a forward-and-backward reflexivity to his narrative that is reductive toward female sexuality and human experience.
In a scene titled “Huckleberry,” a young runaway boards a child’s abandoned swimming boat and makes her way down a river. We’re meant to think of Huckleberry Finn and Jim’s trip down the Mississippi—a symbol of the social and spiritual unrest of a collective America—but the sinister lyricism masks an even more sinister intention: If the lamb by the side of the river is any indication, the child is just some big dumb animal that Solondz is happy to lead to slaughter.
Here and elsewhere, Solondz fails to differentiate between good and evil, sadistically lumping everyone into the same boat and calling it a day. In the film, multiple girls and women play the same character: 12-year-old Aviva, who inexplicably wants to get pregnant and suffers countless abuses when she runs away from home after her parents force her to have an abortion. Young or old, fat or skinny, Black or white—they’re all the same to Solondz, whose latest stunt doesn’t so much examine a shared female experience in America as it blares his complete and utter disconnect from the world and his contempt for everyone who lives in it.
Like Welcome to the Dollhouse’s Dawn Weiner, the frustratingly meek Aviva is another stand-in for Solondz, who fancies himself a spokesman for the socially oppressed but does to celluloid what future serial killers do to butterfly wings. The film begins with Dawn’s funeral and ends with a relative recycling self-defeatist bits from Storytelling. The man may look like a creep but that doesn’t mean he likes to rape small children—at least, that’s what he tells us. He’s yet another Solondz doppelganger who’s more or less on hand to justify the director’s misanthropy, suggesting that it’s part of his DNA. Which is to say that, from beginning to end—or is it forward and backward?— Palidromes is nothing but a totem to its maker’s martyr complex.
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