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Robert Golden has only made two films. This film, Beg, is subversive art, sure, but it doesn't mean that it would be considered very "good" art. It's main intention, for a large portion of the running time, is to disorientate the viewer, constantly, scene to scene, with a ferocious, unyielding grasp of cinematographic technique. There's barely a chance, until perhaps midway through the film, when we get a breather for a few scenes of characters trying to connect and talk, but mostly Golden and his DP string together a bunch of incomprehensible mind-f***s. Sometimes inventive, yes, but never more than just a surface of "hey, we can do lots of colorful-but-dark lighting" and surrealism just for its own sake. The plot itself sounds interesting enough, about Doctor Second and her faulty attempts to control her ward of a mental hospital while also fighting to save the life of her father who is on life support. The actors seem to be left to their own warped devices since the director is too busy making every scene "DIRECTED BY". You might know this kind, like a lessor David Lynch who cares too much about the mood of a scene, and then another and another. It's suffocating to see so much of a flagrancy of technique, of trying to make this story, or stories, more important then they are with flash and whiplash style theatrics with the lens and editing tricks. It's like a magician who keeps throwing plates up in the air with technicolor effects - and then keeps doing it for far long past his welcome.My advice, if you must watch a crazy European art-house movie on a mental hospital, check out Jan Svankmajer's Lunacy instead. There's a reason Golden didn't get very far after this film hit a few festivals and subsequently (and rightfully so) got picked up by Troma video. It looks fantastic, but it goes absolutely nowhere. You keep watching, but you wont know what's really going on most of the time except for lots of flash and sex and abnormal figures doing s***.
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