About half way through this film we are made to watch the most loathsome scene imaginable, lasting about nine gruesome minutes, during which the lovely female lead of the film played by Monica Bellucci is raped and then has her lovely face savagely smashed by the rapist's boot, his fists and the concrete pavement. When her boyfriend sees the red pulp that her lovely face has become he is convulsed with anger and goes on the rampage to wreak vengeance on the animal who has done this. And when he finds him he behaves like an animal himself and smashes the rapist face in with a fire extinguisher. And can we really blame him?
The film is shot in reverse, so we are then taken back to before any of this happened, to a time when she was happy and looking forward to a bright future. The last shot of the film shows her on a bright, sunny summers day lying on the grass in the park reading a book in perfect contentment, quite unaware what the future holds in store for her, and surrounded by a group of happy children playing at dodge the grass sprinkler to the music of the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.
It's painful to see any kind of beauty destroyed, but when it's the fragile beauty of a lovely young woman, it becomes almost unbearable. Having her face defaced must be a woman's worst fear, though in the course of time all beauty is destroyed, in the course of time her beauty would have been lost to wrinkles and sagging flesh. But to have it destroyed with such brute force and so senselessly is what made the scene so horrific. And all because the thug hated her for being rich!
The film is shot in reverse, so we are then taken back to before any of this happened, to a time when she was happy and looking forward to a bright future. The last shot of the film shows her on a bright, sunny summers day lying on the grass in the park reading a book in perfect contentment, quite unaware what the future holds in store for her, and surrounded by a group of happy children playing at dodge the grass sprinkler to the music of the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.
It's painful to see any kind of beauty destroyed, but when it's the fragile beauty of a lovely young woman, it becomes almost unbearable. Having her face defaced must be a woman's worst fear, though in the course of time all beauty is destroyed, in the course of time her beauty would have been lost to wrinkles and sagging flesh. But to have it destroyed with such brute force and so senselessly is what made the scene so horrific. And all because the thug hated her for being rich!