Dard Divorce feels like it was made by someone who would like to make a snuff film but wanted to do a dry run first. That someone was director Olaf Ittenbach. Incidentally, I wouldn’t be surprised if he wrote the script in his native German and then ran it through Google Translate.
The movie is narrated by Nathalie Stein (Martina Ittenbach). According to Nathalie, her parents, “Sabina and Banat Stein” (who will never appear nor be mentioned ever again, so who gives a shit about their first names) came to California “15 years ago” and “started [a] fast food restaurant.”
“As if there weren’t enough in America,” Nathalie snidely remarks (while a brief montage of famous fast-food joints plays), only to admit that her father “did very well.” That’s a small sample of the sort of schizophrenic writing that characterizes this screenplay.
Nathalie “got pregnant at the tender age of 14” and married the child’s father, Tim (Barrett Jones). Now, Nathalie’s family “immigrated … from Germany,” which explains Nathalie’s accent. Why the daughter, Elisabeth (Henora Jackson), born to an American father and presumably raised from birth in the USA, also speaks with an accent, I haven’t the foggiest.
Nathalie and Tim are calling it quits. “The irony is that I’m a divorce attorney, and I’ll be sure to leave him with nothing,” says Nathalie. Um, what’s ironic about that?
Don’t divorce lawyers get divorced like everybody else? (a marriage counselor, that’d be a different story). And when they do, doesn’t it stand to reason that they would be likely to get the upper hand on their soon-to-be ex-spouses?
Tim drops by to pick up Elisabeth and her younger brother Jeremy (Gideon Jackson), leaving Nathalie home alone. She goes upstairs and finds a sheet of paper with a one-word message. She reads it and immediately calls the police (she knows the number, too long to be 9-1-1, by heart): “I’ve just been threatened with murder… It’s a letter with the word ‘dard’ written in blood. Of course it’s a murder threat.”
When Detective Carey shows up, Nathalie asks him, “What does ‘dard’ mean?” Huh? I thought she knew what it meant, and I thought for sure it must mean ‘I kill you scum!’ (or something like that); otherwise, why was she so sure that it was a death threat?
Later, another police officer, Phil Warren (Jaymes Butler), will pay Nathalie a visit, purportedly on Carey’s behalf. Nathalie is skeptical of Phil’s claims, so she tests him by asking him the name of his boss.
“His name is Gates. Detective James Gates,” is Phil’s answer. “There is no Detective James Gates,” replies Nathalie. “His name was Carey.” She’s mostly right. There’s no Detective James Gates in the movie, but there is one in the closing credits, which don’t include any character named Carey. I’m assuming that Kamary Phillips, who is billed as playing Gates, is actually playing Carey.
Moreover, Phil is referred to as a “Detective” in the credits, even though not only is he a fake cop, but he’s a fake uniformed cop. Speaking of which, since Phil is not in cahoots with Carey (otherwise he would have known his fucking name), what happened to the actual police officer Carey told Nathalie he would send?
So far, Dard Divorce has been a moronic helping of accidental comedy. Things take a turn for the uncomfortable with Phil’s appearance, which signals the beginning of the Passion of Nathalie Stein, wherein she is brutally beaten, sadistically tortured, and sexually molested by Phil and others (who want to know the whereabouts of some money and some “cokes” that Tim may or may not have stolen).
Grievous bodily harm then metastasizes throughout the film, the camera lingering unflinchingly on it, to the point that the violence is not just graphic but pornographic — a masturbatory exercise with no rhyme or reason other than gore for the sake of gore.
It soon becomes clear that Olaf was getting off on this shit. Why else would he shoot a scene depicting in disturbing detail the gruesome demise of 10-year-old Jeremy, only to reveal afterward that it never really happened? It doesn’t get any more gratuitous than that.
Or how about Nathalie’s lover (Torsten Mühlbach)? A nameless afterthought (he’s literally identified as “Lover” in the credits) who only has two scenes: a sex scene and a death scene. After being briefly shown schtupping Nathalie in the bathroom stall of a bar, he will be duly forgotten until it’s time for him to be disemboweled with extreme prejudice.
You can tell the ultraviolence brought Olaf the most joy because it’s the aspect of the film to which he devoted the most serious effort. Everything else — the sets, the dialogue, the performances, the plot so impenetrably nonsensical that it defies description — is shoddy, slipshod, slapdash, and whatever other adjectives synonymous with poor quality there are.
The brutality, however, is painstakingly, lovingly even, enacted with old-school craftsmanship. From a technical standpoint, it’s nothing short of admirable. In this graceless age when even blood is computer-generated, the gallons of real fake plasma and the props simulating body parts and human organs that (for lack of a better term) adorn Dard Divorce are a breath of fresh air.
Those things don’t exist in a vacuum, though. Within the overall context, the violence is excessive without ever going over the top, which would have made it as cartoonish as the rest of the movie.
Olaf didn’t care if we gave any credence to events going on around it, but when it came to the gore itself, he went out of his way to try to ensure we couldn’t doubt it, and he succeeds at least as often as he fails. That’s a lot, given the sheer volume of barbarity on display.