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This post contains spoilers for the moviePiercing.
Enter Jackie, a call girl played byMia Wasikowska.
AlthoughPiercingdefies tidy explanations, Vulture took time to speak with Pesce about his films jarring climax.
In addition to his hallucinatory flashbacks, the room itself turns against him, too.
When you walk in from the get-go its already kind of trippy.
We have wallpaper with all these lines and these swirls.
Its, like, very vulvic in a Georgia OKeeffe kind of way.
So much of this sequence is like the unraveling of their kind of game together, Pesce tells Vulture.
And its also like the unraveling of the style of the movie too.
Its super-formalist up until this point, and then you start getting wackier.
So its very much a turning point stylistically, emotionally, and tonally.
A mother chastising him and threatening to burn his eye with a cigarette.
A leather daddy having violent anal sex with a woman, and a little girl in a dominatrix outfit.
It kind of makes you want to actually throw up after a little while.
It was physically intense to have to do that over and over.
Pesce likened it to directing them in separate scenes where they happened to share space with each other.
That all changes in the climax.
When Reed briefly comes out of his haze, he starts binding Jackies wrists with rope.
Still groggy, he whimpers, I thought this is what you wanted!
while she screams, and for the first time in the whole movie Jackie and Reed understand each other.
She wrestles him off, and he passes out once more.
Its a platonic kind of love story, but its like finding your soulmate.
