It sounds really interesting! I'll have to see if I can find it.

I absolutely love Frank Wedekind's work after I read/saw Spring Awakening, he's a bit of a children revolutionary

Great to hear another one of his works is being translated! I have to check this film out o.o The coffins bit sounds especially haunting.

DerJakob wrote:

I just downloaded this to watch it, especially because I can't resist anything tied to German literature (and even more especially fin-de-siècle stuff). I'm starting it now, but a quick note: the German title of the story is "Mine-Haha, oder Über die körperliche Erziehung der jungen Mädchen." The wording of that title is tricky enough as it is and isn't lightly or guiltlessly translated, but what caught my eye and made me do a little research first was the "Mine-Haha" part, which sounded like a lot of geographical names from the Midwest. Sure enough, I remembered that "Minnesota" means "sky-blue water," and upon investigation discovered that "Mine-haha" means "laughing water." Excited I am!

Ok, that said, I'm gonna watch it now. Thanks for the recommendation!

Where did you find it for download?? I swear I've looked everywhere. No local videorental stores have it in my area and as a student I'm actually very weak on funds for things like media

Just finished it!

Gorgeous film, lots to say, not sure what exactly. I suppose one of the first things I noticed upon finishing it is that it ends exactly as it begins, which makes it nice and cyclical, like the inescapable reality of sex and gender socialization. Yay silent ideological oppression! All of the water imagery is really fantastic, complete with the vaginal waterfall in the beginning and phallic spout at the end. Etrangere wrote a nice number on water imagery in SKU last week, so it'd be really interesting to compare those observations with this film.

Aside from that, it's an obvious critique of gender socialization and femininity (complete with boundaries and borders!). And, in my experience with French satire, it's not always funny, but is, in fact, often rather disconcerting, and in the tradition does not offer any alternatives to the system that it critiques. Woe! Tough stuff, but true to the core. I really enjoyed it and will need to watch it again to say anything more profound, but I'm open to anything anyone else has to say.