Foreign affairs

Foreign affairs

Currently in the eye of a storm at the Indian Censor Board office, Fight Club featuring Hollywood's golden boys Brad Pitt and Edward Norton may be best described as a dark satire about the soullessness of corporate America or about the moral vacuum of consumerism. It's a film about a yuppie executive (Norton) with an impressive job, a lavish condo and bright prospects who realises that he has everything, but doesn't care about any of it. Of course, the realisation comes when he meets a soap salesman (Pitt) who opens his eyes to the possibility that he can live without material goods. And that, leads the pair into the last word in self-help therapy: beating the living daylights out of each other in mutually consensual bare-knuckle brawls where participation is more important than winning or losing.

With only a single female lead and a plot driven by the millennial male fear of gender redundancy, Fight Club's surely going to become a hugely influential film for the same set of people it portrays, doing for disenfranchised twentysomething males what The Breakfast Club once did for moody teenagers.

At the end of the day, you could argue that Fight Club is a celebration of corrupted masculinity as vehemently as the opposing view that it's a parody of these ideals. It won't make any difference, though because, either way, this is a thrilling, intelligent and shocking blasterpiece.