And head-tripping is very much part of Mr. Reygadas's cinema, whether or not he's tethered his sometimes lovely, sometimes appalling visions to a strong narrative.
In "Spectre-1914," Ms. Auclair was clearly a prophet beholding appalling visions of war as she rose tall and awesome in a black robe.
Next to the Crucifixion itself (whose violent details I spared my son and daughter until age 7 or so), the image of a man-size rodent that lurches around people's houses late at night, clutching fragile treats in its curled paws, strikes me as one of the most appalling nightmare visions that adults can inflict on tender minds.
I'm glad it will be seen here, but the fact that the Guggenheim, the Whitney and the Modern could not fit it into their schedules shows an appalling narrowness of vision.
In undercutting the appalling bleakness of his vision of the current state of relations between men and women, he muddies his own argument to such an extent that the audience isn't necessarily appalled by Katherina's submission - the performance I saw included some poor deluded souls who tried to clap it.
This vision is not only appalling and mean-spirited, it is bad economics.
Céline, in short, is one of the great problems in twentieth-century literature: you find yourself irresistibly drawn in by the fearless singularity of his vision, even while aware of the appalling place to which it led him.
Was it, it has been asked, a double of the man rising from harrowing nightmares or from the haggard inner vision of dark crimes or from appalling graveyard fantasies that loomed in Poe's unstable being?
Everything suddenly becomes clear, and she stares at a vision that is clearly both ridiculous and appalling.
