Hard Candy (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Hard candy |
| Original title | Hard candy |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 2005 |
| length | about 100 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK No youth approval |
| Rod | |
| Director | David Slade |
| script | Brian Nelson |
| music |
Harry Escott Molly Nyman |
| camera | Jo Willems |
| cut | Art Jones |
| occupation | |
| |
Hard Candy is an American psychological thriller and drama from director David Slade from the year of 2005.
action
14-year-old Hayley Stark met 32-year-old photographer Jeff Kohlver on the Internet . The beginning of the film shows a chat with sexual tension between the two. The two meet after three weeks in the Café Nighthawks ("night owls"). Jeff is taken with the surprisingly mature, intelligent, and outgoing Hayley. She persuades him to take her home with him. At first it looks like Jeff is trying to seduce the girl, but he faints because Hayley put knockout drops in his drink .
Jeff wakes up tied to a chair and is confronted with Hayley's allegations that he is a pedophile . She criticizes the sexually excited photographs of underage girls that he took himself and that adorn the apartment. In his safe, she discovers child pornography and a photo of the missing girl, Donna Mauer. Jeff is able to free himself from the chair later in the film, but is again overwhelmed by Hayley and then fixed on a table. She wants to castrate him and thus pull him out of circulation as a potential sex offender . By means of local anesthesia using ice cubes and a video that is supposed to show the live image of the castration that has just been carried out, she succeeds in faking him. Jeff is able to free himself again and notices the deception. He returns to his living room and wants to call the police - but before the conversation starts, he hangs up again and decides to take revenge on Hayley himself.
Jeff can't overwhelm Hayley and so she slowly but surely drives him crazy. The exposure of pedophile tendencies and the involvement in the disappearance of Donna Mauer could mean the end of his successful career as a photographer and result in criminal prosecution. Hayley also threatens to tell everything to his childhood sweetheart Janelle Rogers, with whom Jeff is apparently still very much in love. Eventually he admits to being involved in the death of Donna Mauer, but not the killer, and offers Hayley to name the killer. She reveals that she already knows this, and Aaron (the man's name) said Jeff was the killer, but offers to judge himself and then any clues that may point to Jeff's possible pedophile tendencies and his involvement in close the murder case, destroy it. Jeff then commits suicide by jumping off the roof with a rope around his neck that Hayley has attached to the chimney immediately after Janelle, whom Hayley called, arrives at his house. Most recently, the young girl promised the desperate man that she would destroy all evidence of Jeff's pedophile behavior immediately after his death. Immediately after his jump, she runs to the edge of the roof and, speaking to herself, says: "Or not."
Emergence
Producer David Higgins las wanted to proceed with a criminal case in Japan in which schoolgirls against men who searched the internet for appointments with underage girls by getting into vigilantism online accounted for an appointment with a man and this subsequently raided. The case threw an interesting perspective on the question of who the hunted and who the hunter is.
According to Higgins, the film was supposed to be a kind of psychological study with two multi-dimensional main characters in a small space. He wanted to work with a playwright, which is why Brian Nelson was involved in the creation process. Higgins and Nelson created the story together over a period of two months, after which Nelson wrote the script. Nelson drew on his experiences with adolescent girls as a theater educator in schools in Hayley's conception: “Most of my theater students are female, most are great, and most are grappling with a world that is fundamentally unfair. I wanted to make Hayley smart and funny and creative, just as my best students always were. "
After completing the script, Higgins selected David Slade to direct and brought on board Vulcan Productions in Seattle and their producers Richard Hutton and Michael Caldwell .
The film was shot in Los Angeles on 18 days in June 2004 . Except for the café scene at the beginning and the outside scenes, the shooting took place chronologically in the order of the script. Jeff's house was built in a film studio , partly inspired by the house of producer David Higgins. After the scenes in Jeff's house were filmed, the outside scenes were recorded and in the meantime the stage was converted for the café scene, which was the last to be shot. Stunts were performed by both actors themselves.
The film had a production budget of $ 950,000.
Staging
dramaturgy
Except for the opening scene, the entire film takes place in and around Jeff Kohlver's house; besides the two main actors there are only three other, very small roles. The film is rich in dialogues between the two main characters.
While sexual violence and child pornography are major themes in the film, there are no explicit depictions of them. Rebecca Stringer writes that this dramaturgical decision would break with the viewers' expectations of the portrayal of violence against women: “As if they were aware of the feminist criticism that the graphic representation of harassment can objectify the victim and appear pornographic, the makers leave von Hard Candy from taking advantage of female suffering and chicane in her film. “Instead of female suffering, the suffering of the privileged male main character is depicted.
Jeff should, according to director David Slade, be portrayed as friendly as possible and evoke compassion from the viewer: "People like Jeff are so good at hiding behind a mask and denying who they are" . Patrick Wilson was also chosen for the role because at first glance he doesn't look malicious at all.
Music, sound and colors
The film contains only nine minutes of background music. The music was composed by Molly Nyman , daughter of the famous film composer Michael Nyman , and Harry Escott . Two songs appear in the film, Freak by Mark Bell and the song Elephant Woman by the band Blonde Redhead in the credits, which, according to Slade, almost became the film's theme music.
The sound design contributes significantly to the tension of the film, according to Slade. There were four different keys for Hayley, depending on what mood she is in during the film. The colors of the film are also adapted to the emotions of the two main characters.
Themes and motifs
The film is classified as a rape and revenge film because of its theme of a girl's revenge for sexual violence . The castrating, pubescent girl represents a trope in the younger tradition of the genre, which also appears in the film Teeth . According to Slade, the film should not glorify revenge, but instead encourage the viewer to think through the ambivalent portrayal of both main characters, what is still acceptable and what is not. For both main characters one should have sympathy one moment and hatred the next.
The film takes up social discourses on how society should deal with pedophilia and the danger of online seduction of children. Since the viewer knows little about Hayley at the end of the film, she is, according to Nelson, "a kind of cinematic Rorschach test of who you are and how you think about the topics presented in the film" .
By reversing the usual perpetrator and victim role of sexual violence, Stringer discovers a swap of gender roles in the film. This subversion is highlighted at the beginning of the film by staging a clear break in the atmosphere of the film: First, Hayley is portrayed as if she were actually interested in Jeff's seduction, while from the scene in which she stuns him, Hayley's actual intentions of vigilante justice as a seemingly feminist is clear avenger of sexual offenders. Jeff himself expresses his surprise at the unexpected role reversal in one scene: "You need help, a teenage girl doesn't do this" .
Stringer sees the figure of Hayley as clearly feminist, as she occupies numerous established positions of feminist criticism of the power relationships between men and women. She criticizes the sexual objectification of women and girls through the “male gaze” when she speaks of Jeff's photographic work. She criticizes Victim blaming when Jeff justifies himself with Hayley's alleged will to be seduced by him. Hayley's username in chat Thonggrrrl14 is based on the feminist music movement Riot Grrrl . Claire Henry, on the other hand, sees the feminist tone of the film as differentiated. The film creates a context for castration fear and warns indirectly against the collapse of patriarchal power structures through the portrayal of the white American man as a victim who is supposed to arouse empathy .
Hayley wears a red hoodie in reference to the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood . Hayley is interpreted as Little Red Riding Hood and Jeff as the wolf or perpetrator of the sexual abuse of children as the wolf and the victims of abuse as Little Red Riding Hood.
The term hard candy (English for "bonbon") stands in the English Internet jargon for a sexually provocative underage girl.
reception
The film premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival . On April 14, 2006, the film received a restricted release in the United States. The film grossed more than $ 8 million at the box office.
Reviews
"The formally ambitious, thematically but questionable vigilante justice thriller sanctions its material completely without criticism and detachment and presents torture as a morally legitimate means of entertainment."
“She [Ellen Page] cleverly takes control and prepares her admirer for some intense hours that will be unforgettable for both of them and every spectator. Friends of intelligent shockers should understand this as a recommendation, everyone else as a warning. "
“An exciting and damn provocative chamber thriller game that will spark discussions. Hitchcock would have loved this poisonous movie "
“With this jewel of a chamber play-like psychological thriller [...] the viewer is thrown into a rollercoaster of emotions from which he is no longer freed until the disturbing end. Great cinema in a small, controversial setting! "
“'Hard Candy' is a disturbing psychological thriller that especially men have to hold on to. Who is the victim and who is the perpetrator cannot be clearly determined and that is what makes the real tension of the thriller, which captures two extraordinary acting performances in wonderfully bizarre images. A film that divides minds, raises many questions and is sure to have a long-lasting effect. [...] Beautiful and disturbingly bizarre. "
Awards
Sitges Festival Internacional de Cinema de Catalunya
- Best movie
- Audience award
- Best script
Web links
- Hard Candy in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Hard Candy atrotten tomatoes(English)
- Official website of the film
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i Presskit for Hard Candy . Lionsgate, accessed June 7, 2016 .
- ↑ a b c d e f g SXSW Interview: Hard Candy Filmmakers. (No longer available online.) In: SXSW. March 27, 2016, archived from the original on June 7, 2016 ; Retrieved June 7, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b Hard Candy (2006). In: The Numbers. Retrieved June 7, 2016 .
- ↑ a b c d Rebecca Stringer: From Victim to Vigilante. Gender, Violence and Revenge in The Brave One (2007) and Hard Candy (2005) . In: Hilary Radner, Rebecca Stringer (Eds.): Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema . Routledge, 2011.
- ↑ a b c Claire Henry: Revisionist Rape-Revenge: Redefining a Film Genre . Springer, 2014, p. 57 .
- ^ Pauline Greenhill, Steven Kohm: Little Red Riding Hood and the Pedophile in Film: Freeway , Hard Candy , and The Woodsman . In: Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures . tape 1 , no. 2 , 2009, p. 35-65 .
- ↑ Urban Dictionary: hard candy
- ↑ Hard Candy. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed December 7, 2017 .
- ↑ Hard Candy. In: Cinema . Hubert Burda Media , accessed December 7, 2017 .
- ↑ Hard Candy. In: MovieMan.de. Retrieved December 7, 2017 .
