This is a strange film to watch on a whim, knowing nothing about it or its director, but so I did. Maybe it’s best to watch it with absolutely no preconceptions or expectations. It starts bizarrely, all unsettling camera angles and quippy, rhyming dialogue. After about five minutes I fell into its flow. Five minutes more, and I fell in love…

Forget the narrative: every summary I’ve read sounds absurd. Let’s call it a postmodern horror film, in which language — and the self we align with it — is deconstructed down to nothing. What begins with delicious wordplay ends up in spastic, monosyllabic utterances here lucid and revealing, there wonderful nonsense (thank you, thank you, to the translator who chose the verb “to smurf”). Delight as our once dependable bodies begin confusing shoes for gloves, crabs for brassieres, and finally into writhing, instinctive, violent shells. Love is hell, and what’s there to do once either concept is lost?

Or, put it this way. Any filmmaker who includes a dead dwarf bellboy holding hands with a 6-foot stuffed rabbit in a film knows what he’s doing. If you are looking for postmodern horror, that’s as good as it gets.

Or, fine, if you don’t want to talk Derrida with me at all, Sophie Marceau is naked in it a lot.

I had no expectation of loving this film this much. I’m on one of those post-viewing highs in which I am literally trembling with enthusiasm and affectedness — I had no such expectation.

This is such a warm-hearted, genuine, deeply funny, deeply moving film. I don’t have words enough to praise it. Although it is so simple and in no way an ‘innovative’ film, I have honestly never seen anything like it. It is perfectly, simply, so precisely the film it intends itself to be. This is a rare thing…

Spanning three generations of women, this has a lot to say about family, death, history repeating, and women’s relationships. I don’t want to mar it with these trite sentiments, though, because again: it is as simple as it seems but so perfect in that simplicity. Penélope Cruz truly does give a transformative, eye-opening performance, and every nuanced expression that crosses Carmen Maura’s face left me physically reeling. (Next project, I think, will be her filmography.) The last half hour so cunningly answers all questions… It’s brilliant. I’m about to enter full ramble mode, so I’ll stop here…

On a tangent: surprisingly, it seems the more films I see the fewer rating distinctions I need. In the wake of this film, I’m cutting back to five, on the Netflix model (loved it — really liked it — liked it — disliked it — hated it). That’s all I need, and I won’t stand for what taking a half star away from this exquisite film would imply. Full marks. It is the best film from 2006 I have seen.

One of the critical lines on this film is that it is WKW’s ‘quintessential work.’ I’m left wondering if it isn’t more accurate to say that it encompasses all aspects of WKW’s work, bigger, louder, & bolder: echoes of films past, unexpectedly interwoven storylines, virtuosic camerawork, and (for want of a more culturally discrete term) a kind of magical realism — his own mythology. All that, with much more bang and flash. This is not necessarily a criticism of the film, but somewhere in the shuffle this became one of the less compelling WKW films I’ve seen. There are many powerful and simply impressive scenes, no doubt about it. I just can’t quite put this in a category with the rest.