Chicken a l'Orange with a dash of Hitler makes for a chilling dinner party.Chilling film, indeed. On the face of it, the message is clear: Cheating on your wife, and leading a double life, may - and do, in David's case - lead to a circle of people with horrific beliefs. That fateful dinner party shocks David into realizing that his proper place is with Lana.
But at a deeper level, the film is brilliant for its probing look at our humanity and our psychology. Miles and Maeve's home is like a petri dish for those horrific beliefs, and evidently David's girlfriend Stella belongs in that home. In his shock, this is part of what he realizes as well.
Whether we see the holocaust as exclusively an anti-Semitic tragedy or perhaps a debatable anti-Nazi propaganda, as the film chillingly lays out, the fact is that humankind harbors a wider variety of horrific beliefs and our history is littered with horrific acts that we've inflicted on each other. Those beliefs and acts cause fissures among people, which run invisible boundaries between those who belong and those who do not.
The somber, if not ominous soundtrack, through the end of the film suggests that, far from an ennobling commentary about humankind, David's and Lana's romantic reunion serves to widen those fissures and deepen those boundaries.
It's a brilliantly chilling film.
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