Leave La France! Chapter 19: Death By Witchcraft

Ok, so I'm bending the rules a bit with this one, but I have to bring this thing to a close somehow, don't I? And if you think I'm going to go back to the lesser works of Jean Rollin, you've got another thing coming, my friend. Ok, so as I've illustrated, it isn't really all that difficult to take in the bulk of French horror films in a relatively short period of time (I did it over the course of 3 months but it took less actual time than that. I do have other things to do....even if it doesn't always seem like it). Anyway, one thing that is a neat recurrence is when themes show up across a country's genre films in altered forms. Today's films have a thematic kinship in their interest in the supernatural intersecting with the ordinary in highly fantastic ways. I have no reason to believe that Christophe Gans and Eric Valette borrowed from each other, so it remains a charming coincidence that their movies dip into the same inkwell. A word about my choice of Gans film: I considered doing his earlier Le Pacte Des Loupes or Brotherhood of the Wolf, but it's not a proper horror film. It is an action film at heart despite its very sinister and beautiful imagery and ostensible premise. Perhaps when I look at flamboyant werewolf movies (Neil Jordan's Company of Wolves and Mike Nichols' Wolf are at the top of that list) I'll dig out my copy of Brotherhood. It is a fun movie, despite its flaws, but I digress. Today we look at the effects of unexplainable forces on polite citizens and the failure of law enforcement to contain witchcraft.

Maléfique
by Eric Valette

In a prologue that introduces us not only to the film's content but its budget, we see a fellow in a prison in 1920s France. With several dead or injured people scattered about his cell, one man draws some symbols on the wall (in one of his cellmates' blood) while reciting an incantation of some sort. Just as some truly terrible looking CG fire erupts from the drawings, we are brought into the story proper. A fellow called Carrère tries to keep a smile on in front of his boy while his wife busts his balls. Not that she has a good reason; the man's in prison for fraud, after all. Regardless, Carrère remains optimistic and promises his son he'll be out of jail for his upcoming birthday. Let's meet his cellmates. There's Pâquerette, a man-child who likes bouncing about. We meet him as Marcus, a burly transvestite, cuts off the tips of his fingers so that the giggly boy can have some time in hospital. Marcus is the one in charge, even if Lassalle, the philosopher who murdered his wife in a brief fit of insanity, seems smarter and more calculating than his gormless cellmates. In fact they all seem to know a little more than each lets on, but for now, it's humdrum cell life for Carrère.

Carrère bugs the others with his optimism. He's convinced his wife will bail him out but Marcus seems to know that ain't gonna pan out. Just about the time that Pâquerette comes back from his stay in the hospital, which coincides with the newcomer getting a feeling for how his three cellmates spend their days, they find something in the wall next to Carrère's bed. It's an old book written in a number of different languages and featuring symbols that we recognize from the walls of the prologue. Carrère is more interested than either of the others and reads enough to get a narrative from some of the more lucid passages: the author's name was Charles Danvers and he was obsessed with eternal youth. He used to steal placenta and inject it into his veins to try and achieve his ends. These stories don't do much more than bug Marcus but when Pâquerette figures out that Danvers wrote spells in the book, he insists on a display of magic. Lasalle asks Carrère to humour the boy, so he recites a passage not realizing that the finger-shy idiot had drawn some symbols from the book on the floor with Marcus' lipstick. Upon reciting the words, the symbol bursts into flame. The book has everyone's attention now. Lasalle recites a spell while the others sleep that causes Pâquerette to get out of bed and grind his remaining fingers to nubs against the wall in his sleep. He'll later tell Marcus that the wall ate his hand, which he doesn't believe for a second. Carrère tries to get back in his good graces by showing him a spell in the back of the book that he thinks Danvers used to escape. This appeases him up until the moment that the spell fails. While Marcus flips out at both Carrère and Lasalle, Pâquerette eats some pages of the book, which turns out to be a big mistake. His body bends and twists itself in midair until he breaks in half; the guards blame Marcus as he's the only one in the cell physically capable of pulling off such a nightmarish feat. Around this time, Carrère's wife divorces him, takes his name off the books at his company and hides his son from him, giving him and Marcus equally good reasons to try and escape. Some last minute developments seem designed to make sure that they use the book to escape, even if it isn't quite the escape they dreamt of.

There is a lot to have to buy to get through Maléfique. The appearance of the book in their cell is the first coincidence but without it, no film so that's fine. It's pretty much every development surrounding it that needs a grain of salt to go down. The bit with the toy soldier that Carrère's son gives him, the fact that Lasalle happens to know everything there is to know about the book (a Hail Mary if ever there was one), the transportation through time and finally their replacement cellmate, Hippolyte Picus. Picus exists to forward the plot along and remind the other prisoners to fight against imprisonment to get what they most want. It's a stretch but I figure Valette's trying to put us in mind of Hippolytus, a figure in mythology wrongly accused of rape. He's a total deux ex machina and a cheat to get to the ending, but I forgive it because I had fun. In fact I forgive everything, the extraordinarily convenience of the scripts many twists and turns, the total lack of budget, the occasional bout of over-acting and the Twilight Zone riff of an ending because it was a lot of fun to watch. There's a lot of plot in a little time but it moves briskly and provides you with enough clues to make sure that nothing (except Picus) is totally out of left-field. It is to Eric Valette's credit that he could make so much bullshit work so splendidly. He must be commended for making an effective and exciting film that takes place pretty much entirely in a tiny room with four characters. The little things that I took issue with didn't hang around long enough to grate against the flow, so Maléfique is at its best a rather fun and pretty nasty little movie.

It goes by so quickly that you almost forget that Valette was trying to make a proper film in the confines of what would ordinarily be a straight-to-DVD release given it's budget (which it most certainly was in the States, anyway). Firstly there's all those Dickens references hanging about (Lasalle's talk of choosing his own fate, Picus as a ghost of things to come, the fact that the film takes place in a prison and the heroes want very much to get out of it. I thought at first Charles Danvers was another, as it sounds Dickensian, but it's taken from Rebecca) that Valette nicely tucks in to prove he's not just a B-director trying to make a buck. I think his conventional (despite it's grimness) ending is also to be sort of commended. First of all, his interpretation of Lasalle's quest for knowledge is a nice re-imagining of an idea that both John Boorman and Stephen Spielberg have botched pretty egregiously. Secondly, you don't quite know how Carrère's going to end up because Valette keeps the book's true nature a secret for long enough to blind you to the inevitability of the conclusion, which he had been slyly broadcasting for most of the film. It's not perfect by any means but it is a fun way to spend an hour twenty and then think about what you just saw and how things you thought were window-dressing actually meant something. And that's what's nice about Maléfique, what starts as a grim and conventional film (and ends also fairly conventionally) is actually a meditation on desire and about the things we hold onto when separated from what we love. Wouldn't be French if it had only one-dimension, I suppose.

Lastly, I think kudos are in order for Clovis Cornillac. Those of you who have seen Eden Log are in for a treat because that movie's mud-covered action hero is a body-building drag queen in Maléfique and I have to say I found him a lot more likable here than in that self-indulgent video game of a film. He's a real person with faults and neuroses yet he's also the most frightening thing in the movie and considering he has menace even in a wig and fake breasts, that's no small accomplishment. It's a nice way to skirt the fact that the movie has no women but for Carrère's little-seen wife. Conversely, before our next film was made, the producers were concerned about whether or not a movie like this could afford to not have a single male character. Revisions took place and a concerned father was added to the story, but really this is a woman's film about uniquely female problems, which is kinda funny because it was written and directed by a couple of old men.

Silent Hill
By Christophe Gans

Rose Da Silva has a problem. Her adopted daughter Sharon keeps having bouts of sleepwalking mixed with night terrors. We join her as she narrowly stops her poor daughter from falling into a ravine. Whenever Sharon gets woken from her dreams, she always screams the same two words at the top of her register: Silent Hill. Rose is no slouch when it comes to her daughter. She and her husband Christopher have gone to specialist after specilist and Rose herself has taken to researching Silent Hill, which turns out to be a town that was abandoned because of the long-burning coal fire raging below it's streets. Rose figures that the paucity of information regarding Sharon's pre-orphanage days probably means that something very bad happened in Silent Hill and her poor little girl is repressing those memories. Since no one knows just where Sharon came from, it's as safe a bet as any that she came from Silent Hill and simply doesn't remember it. Without telling Christopher, Rose takes Sharon and drives her towards Silent Hill hoping to jog some memories. This doesn't go well. A motorcycle cop tries to stop Rose but she's not about to let some chick with a badge get in the way of her impromptu therapy session. She speeds off and after crossing the bridge into town and smashing through a locked gate nearly crashes the car. When she wakes up the next morning Sharon has disappeared.

Rose can only get her husband on the phone for a couple of seconds before losing reception, so she runs off into downtown Silent Hill to try and find her little girl. A few words about Silent Hill, it's abandoned, it snows ash and at night the place turns into a fiery hellhole where industrial-looking demons roam about looking for people to cut to pieces. Rose survives her first night in town (which is signalled by an air-raid siren), but just barely. She chases a little girl who looks alarmingly like her daughter into a dank basement of some kind where she gets attacked by evil children right out of The Brood. Before any lasting damage is done she wakes up alone once again in an abandoned building. By this time, the cop (whose name we'll learn is Cybil Bennett) whom Rose gave the slip the other night has found her way into Silent Hill and is looking to make an arrest. She only succeeds in dragging her back to her car in handcuffs before something weird shows up to change their dynamic. A creeping, armless, man-shaped thing wanders out of the mist and refuses to cow to Officer Bennett's bullets. Rose and Cybil book it back to town and are almost killed by a marauding gang of burly people wearing sack-like hazmat suits and gas-masks and carrying pipes. Just when the two women escape the gang's clutches, the sun goes down, the sirens start and the real fun begins. This time Rose and Cybil have to tangle with a contortionist wrapped in barbed wire, a seven-foot tall Maplethorpe photo with a big, red pyramid for a head and a bunch of very big black bugs.

About this time, Christopher looks into just what the fuck happened to make Silent Hill the freakshow it is today (not that he's privy to its horrors). He gets a lot of run-around from an Officer Thomas Good of the Fuck You, Interloper PD, who is so clearly up to no good I don't know why he bothered covering it up. In a scene stolen from The Ring, Chris tries breaking into the hall of records (he finds a picture of a woman and her daughter, who looks exactly like Sharon, taken thirty years earlier) but Good's thought of that, too. Good comes clean enough to explains that everyone in town was involved in a series of rather horrifying misdoings but the past is past, fucker, so go the fuck home and take your big city wife-and-daughter hunt elsewhere. We learn what actually happens very slowly and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense but I think that we're meant to play by some rules that screenwriter Roger Avary simply forgot to outline for us. What it seems like to me is that the people of Silent Hill thought a little girl called Alessa (who is the spitting image of Sharon) was a witch so they convinced her mother to hand her over so they could purify her. But we who've been around the block a few times to all manner of ghost towns and witch burnings and satanic cult meetings all know what purify means...it means burn the everloving fuck out of. But that didn't quite as planned because apparently Alessa was at least evil enough to make her ceremonial cage plummet from the ceiling and start a fire which burned down just about the whole town. Morale's been pretty low ever since. Guess you can imagine what the evil cult (led by an icy matriarch played by a scenery-chewing Alice Krige) living in a church on the edge of town is going to do if they get wind of an Alessa lookalike roaming the streets of their god-fearing town. If you said burn the fuck out of her, you are correct. Rose better speed up her search if she ever wants to see Sharon again.

I should probably mention that Silent Hill is based on a video game which is ordinarily the kiss of death for any movie that wants to be taken seriously (I'll direct you to Uwe Boll's filmography if you have any questions). Of course Christophe Gans has an advantage over anyone else stupid enough to make a movie based on a game, which let's not forget aren't really that well-known for their engrossing stories so much as they are for their repetitive, adrenaline-raising shooting the shit out of evil-doers. Though I know some whiners who would argue with me, to whom I say if you want a story read a fucking book or watch a movie (whoops), video games are not what I call the pinacle of story-telling, especially because the vast majority of them have to go through a rather numbing translation process. In the case of Silent Hill, it was a Japanese game set in America (which meant guessing about a lot of American culture, including coming up with the totally believable and common town name Silent Hill....which shares a post office with Raccoon City, if I'm not mistaken) which then had to be translated back into English from Japanese. The game was then played by French director Christophe Gans who told the story to his screenwriter, Roger Avary, who then set it again in the states using Centralia, PA's coal-fire problem as the basis for the film. That's some King James-style revision we're talking about so it's a minor miracle that Silent Hill makes any fucking sense at all. But for once the video game connection was not enough to destroy the film and I don't think I'm the only person who couldn't hate this as I did Mortal Kombat, Max Payne and Super Mario Bros.

For this we have the uber-passionate Gans to thank, which I shouldn't have been so surprised by considering how amazingly designed his very boyish Brotherhood of the Wolf was. Firstly it's gorgeous; though I imagine that the imagery is largely borrowed and improved upon by the game, Gans does a remarkable job with both the snowy daytime and the hellacious nighttime. The demons and such are nicely realized and Gans clearly put a lot of effort into the visuals (the fellow with the pyramid gets more screentime than most of the human cast, though he makes nothing like sense from a design standpoint but I suppose we can't really blame Gans for liking the game's ideas too much because if he didn't there'd be no film). Again credit must be given to Gans for finding himself in a position after Brotherhood of the Wolf (still the highest grossing French film in America) to basically do whatever he wanted to. Silent Hill was a dream project for him and his love shows through in a way it can't in other video game adaptations because those are transparently about box office receipts. Gans cared enough to hire real talent like Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean, Deborah Kara Unger and Jodelle Ferland and to at least attempt to play the film straight as both a dramatic and artistically satisfying work (it only half succeeds on either account, but that's more than anything else that lists Konami as a producer can claim).

I'll say this, Gans certainly has my number. He could have done worse than produce a beautiful, violent movie with both Radha Mitchell (who I've had a crush on since Pitch Black) and Jodelle Ferland (who had recently obtained her pass for life around the time she was in Silent Hill by appearing in Terry Gilliam's Tideland and carrying The Whole Movie!). Mitchell is always a little better than the underwhelming dramatic tosh she winds up in (Feast of Love, Henry Poole Is Here, Mozart and the Whale); funnily enough she does her best work in genre films because she tries just hard enough to make the film work and thus elevates it (instead of only bringing her A Game to movies that can in no way match her). Her turn in Rogue is marvelously understated and though she's a bit more hysterical here and in Pitch Black, she is still ultra-lovable; she's our Gwenyth Paltrow or Jennifer Aniston. I found it extraordinarily easy to root for her and I was willing to put up with any plot hole Avary threw in her way just to see her conquer it. Ferland is her usual professional self (quite a feat considering she isn't yet old enough to drive) but she doesn't get to do much more than look spooky for most of the film. Sean Bean and Kim Coates are good, though they have no business in Silent Hill. Christopher and his subplot feel very much like a producer's footnote and for the sake of the narrative probably shouldn't have existed even if I love watching Sean Bean do his character actor, husband-and-father thing. In fact, without them Gans may have achieved the sort of woman's worldview that I wager Neil Labute was hoping to tackle with his ridiculously overwrought remake of The Wicker Man (let’s just say the film made Nicholas Cage its hero and you can imagine how superbly Labute failed in every respect to make a good movie, let alone a feminist movie). This is a film where the most crucial point of view comes from the experience of motherhood. Rose's determination to get her daughter to Silent Hill then save her when she makes a big mess of things come from that place that only a mother could ever really know.

So then to have a bunch of superfluous men hanging about trying to explain away all the horrifying things the woman are going through is both distracting and a little patronizing. Kim Coates actually exacerbates the film's biggest plot hole (as well as existing in a subplot lifted piecemeal from Gore Verbinski's The Ring, rainy exteriors and all. And this film was already pushing it with the whole spooky girl motif), that of the whole thirty-year gap between Alessa's burning and Sharon's return to Silent Hill. Avary writes that the whole town was lost in the fire and that Officer Good showed up to pull Alessa from her cage, hence the burns on his face. But Kim Coates is maybe 40, he would have to have been 10 in the flashback, but he's literally the same age. Now I could understand if what Avary is trying to say is that everyone involved in the fire is a ghost of some sort, but Good interacts with people other than Christopher, so...is everyone for miles a ghost? Or was it that they had just spent 50 million dollars making this movie and it was too late to do rewrites and the whole Officer Good subplot was needlessly tacked on? It's not enough to sink the film because I personally wasn't nearly as interested in narrative cohesion as I was in watching Radha Mitchell dodging demons in the burned ruins of a town that looks like a lot of places very near my hometown.

Of course the casting of Radha Mitchell almost didn't happen and I realize that what I liked about Silent Hill isn't really enough to justify it's budget but still and all we could have had it a lot worse. It could have been just as lousy as any other money-grubbing video game movie or it could have been even more self-indulgent. Gans made this film at a time when everyone was looking to slap him on the back and say what a great job he did on Brotherhood of the Wolf. After the success of that film, Christophe Gans was given the keys to the city, so is it his fault that the city he chose was Silent Hill? By and large critics loved Brotherhood of the Wolf (and I don't totally disagree with them) so when Silent Hill showed up, the first film where Gans' id and his comic book collection met in what I like to call the Tarantino Bedchamber, I don't see how they could have expected anything different. It's a beautiful monster charged by anime, video games and goth notebook scribbling and and no one (not even Gans' producers, who refused to show it to critics) gave it the chance they gave Brotherhood. Of course the film was fairly successful at the box office but I don't think it's the best idea in the world to make such a movie that showcases your hobbies and favorite comic books quite so nakedly (you can call me a disgrace to film students but I believe Quentin Tarantino's latest films are approximately the vomited contents of a closet full of collector's edition DVDs). I will say that I enjoyed this movie much more than the majority of the 'blockbusters' we see in the states I just think it could have been much better. In fact I'd say I enjoyed Silent Hill only slightly less than I enjoyed Maléfique. Considering that film was made for a fraction (a tenth, maybe?) of Silent Hill's 50 million dollar budget, I’d say that Eric Valette has a lot to be proud of and that Gans could do with the humbling that might come from watching Maléfique.

Leave La France! Chapter 18: The Inhuman Condition

I'm going to let you in on a secret: the 90s were a horrible time for culture. American culture, especially but the whole thing was very nearly a wash. The few successes (Radiohead, the films of Krzysztof Kieslowski (who we'll return to in just a moment), Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam and Michael Mann, edgier cartoons before Nickolodeon became repulsed by the very notion of 'edgy', Rage Against The Machine, Danny Boyle's first two movies) were only such because they had to work within 'the system' whatever it may have been at the time. It was terrible because largely success was just not on anyone's mind. Insultingly boring sitcoms ruled the airwaves while good TV shows (The Kingdom, Twin Peaks, Fishing With John) couldn't find backing for more than a season or two. Music was ruled by radio-ready tripe, rock became largely irrelevant and boy bands had more fandom than Kurt Cobain could have ever dreamed of killing himself over. The Pixies broke up, Ride broke up, My Bloody Valentine fell apart, Soundgarden broke up, Some Velvet Sidewalk broke up, Chapterhouse broke up; meanwhile people couldn't get enough of Oasis, and when grunge music died down the only thing we had to show for it was a culture ready to accept ultra-dramatic white boys like Creed, Linkin Park, Staind, Nickelback and P.O.D. who all become overnight fucking hitmakers. And film...Ye Gods! Titanic was considered the best picture of 1997 for fuck's sakes! Romantic comedies sold women on the idea of forced domesticity and they bought it en masse, Rob Schneider and Adam Sandler started their 'acting' careers and horror films reached unforeseen lows. It's telling that when you ask people to think of horror in the 90s, overwhelmingly what you hear is Scream and the wave of not-as-goods that followed. Slasher films arrived that would have made cynics like Joe D'Amato raise an eyebrow (incidentally, he bought it during the height of their popularity), late-in-the-game sequels and straight-to-video bores ate up precious shelf-space and there was almost no alternative. Even foreign countries, usually the place for "at least it's better than what we've got here" horror films, couldn't do much better than sub-Evil Dead horror comedies. There were rare exceptions, but the best horror for the most part lay outside the confines of the genre.

Baby Blood
by Alain Robak

In an opening that is way too similar to the sort of thing that used to open Roger Corman movies, a voice that you'll get tired of pretty much immediately, tells you his life story and how his desire is to be born a human being. The voice belongs to an alien parasite of some sort that rides in the body of a leopard from Africa to a French circus, where it then wanders into the womb of the ringleader's already pregnant wife. She flees in terror to a dank apartment building and her husband is only able to find her after a month of searching. She would have enough trepidation coming back to him simply because he's an abusive asshole, nevermind that she has the always-present voice of an alien organism in her belly giving her orders that only she can hear. The alien decides what's best for all involved is for Yanka, for that is the poor woman's name, to stab her husband to death and drink his blood. She can only really go through with half of her plan before she has to flee the apartment. The alien is also omniscient, maybe? The script is never clear about what all he can do, but he knows plenty more than he should considering he's stuck behind six inches of lady the whole film. We then move arbitrarily forward in time leading to the event of the creature's birth and stopping along the way to see all the murdering that Yanka has to do to keep her bundle of terror satisfied enough to refrain from giving her violent ulcerous fits. She kills people, sleeps with people, pretends that she wants to sleep with them so that she can then kill them and does a lot of blood drinking. The birth is not the end of the film, as it should have been if director Alain Robak had any sense but he does not and this film is more than enough proof of that point.

Baby Blood has almost no structure, it's just an assemblage of set-pieces that are just not clever enough to sustain a film that has a timeline built into it. Yanka is already a month or into her pregnancy when we begin, and that in and of itself, the helplessness of a mother and the very strict deadline of a birth at the end, should have been more than enough to build a story and generate tension but Robak and fellow writer Serge Cukier have no interest in that whatsoever. What they wanted to do was make Dead Alive before Dead Alive: a movie with only the most simple of plots that would allow them to ladle on the very obviously fake gore and gratingly awful 'humour'. Characterization is thrown out the window by the time Yanka's ready to give birth when the movie falls the fuck to pieces and can't decide how it wants to end. It feels largely like they were still writing it when they were filming the ending, such is its ramshackle, back-of-a-schoolbus, "and then this happens, and then this happens" feeling. They threw out an intriguing premise with a lot of potential in favor of a rather sordid gore comedy that fails on both accounts, the gore and the comedy. This is a movie whose idea of clever is to have a sign advertising its own sequel halfway through the movie. Way to remind me how trite your movie is!

The gore is plentiful to be sure but it is dreadfully executed. When people are stabbed to death and in Evil Dead fashion actress Emmanuelle Escourrou is splattered with buckets (I mean literally buckets) of blood, I found myself thinking a couple of things, not the least of which was, "Did they think this was funny?" It's not funny to simply have blood in such great quantities because the framing story is too grave to have bouts of slapstick interrupt it. Robak seems to forget that his heroine is an insecure pregnant woman with a timebomb in her belly. There are scenes that are direct quotes (read: stolen passages) from Sam Raimi's movies, as when the fellow leans into a car window to look at Yanka's baby and then his legs kick about as gallons of gore are launched over his feet. Yeah, I've seen that before, except it made sense in Sam Raimi's film because at no point are you asked to take it seriously. Baby Blood has the makings of a real story and it asks for your sympathy and then pulls cheap gags like that off, just after moments of actual concern where Yanka approaches what we're meant to believe is her death. Emmanuelle Escourrou does a remarkable job with no direction and at times does convey at least some of the sense of the inevitability of her death but the movie fails her spectacularly. Not only does her big moment get spoiled by a pair of comic relief ambulance drivers and a sub-Looney Tunes sight gag, she then has to walk around in a daze as the movie peters out beyond its and her character's life expectancy.

Worse still is that the only other people Escourrou interacts with are really slimy caricatures of cads. The men she seduces are all shiftless louts who do all they can to earn their horrid deaths, but who just don't work against Escourrou's tragic and determined femme fatale. There are rules ignored wholesale about tone and their scenes comes across with the same sensibility as if you put Robert Benigni and Helen Mirren in a road movie together. There's also something wildly exploitative about making Escourrou appear naked. She is after all supposed to be pregnant and Robak has her appear nude in scenes that are way-too-well-lit. It's not that she isn't good-looking, it's that I find myself repulsed by someone (Robak) who asks this much of his lead. She's supposed to be big with child and the script acknowledges as much and I really can't stand the thought of Robak explaining to his lead that she is supposed to be both 'fat' and naked. That sort of thing has all kinds of manipulative implications and it took me out of the movie on more than one occasion to simply marvel at how gross the whole idea is. He wants to exploit this most sensitive and harrowing time in a woman's life and still wants her to bring in horny guys by having her appear statically naked in too-bright interiors. So, morally as well as thematically, I found Baby Blood reprehensible. That's not to say that there aren't some good things in here; the stuff just before the birth does have depth to it, even if it is incongruous.

And really it's in that incongruity that lies the problem with the 90s; if there is depth it is hidden behind an abhorrent go-for-broke mentality. The few times that something did manage to balance those elements, truly excellent things happened, but they were so rare that they're now cult items. I like to think of Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant as the ultimate example of strange elements forming a coherent and quite amazing whole. The reason Ferrara was able to fuse drugs, sex and murder with redemption, religious imagery with truly unappealing scenes of debauchery and bottom-feeding was because he offered almost no commentary. His direction is flawlessly understated and we simply see things, as much an observer as the camera and the film dares you to pass judgment on its damned 'hero'. To go from the buddy cop films and the coked-up 'glamour' of police procedural shows of the 1980s to something as unflinchingly ugly and brutal as Bad Lieutenant was pretty much unheard of and to find it at a time when Rosie O'Donnell was a bankable movie star is unbelievable. I imagine those happening upon the music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor would probably have had the same reaction in an era of VH1 divas and one-hit wonder 'alternative' rock bands. Similarly when I found Sombre, our next film, it was, to borrow a phrase from H.P. Lovecraft, eldritch. Not only was the movie uncannily good, it was unassumingly presented yet completely satisfying, one of those rare films that to call it a horror film is to sell it short.

Sombre
by Phillipe Grandrieux

A car travels along a dark road somewhere in France. We do not see it's driver, know it's destination or where it came from. Children laugh at what we'll later see is a puppet show, which never got old in France even if we don't rely on something as simple to entertain kids in the states. A man, Jean, sits in a dark room with a prostitute, giving her directions stripped of anything resembling eroticism or pleasure. His directions are desperate and just when it seems he'll undress and join her, he leaps on top of her and chokes her to death. The scene has no music and is shot in such a way that her body and the murder are shown in fragments, dehumanizing her in the way that Jean must have in order to do something so ghastly. The pattern repeats: a car drives alongside a road, this time passing spectators of the Tour de France, children laugh at the puppet show and Jean murders another woman. This time, two important changes: a child finds the body of his victim and Jean is shown to be the man orchestrating the puppet show. He goes on something like a spree just after and in one day kills two women and looks on his way to a third when he spies a woman, Claire, sitting in her broken-down car on the side of the road. He offers assistance and at once there is something different about their interaction. There's an awkwardness, a sort of rigidity about his performance as a normal man that rings false, which means he's trying to be normal because he doesn't plan on killing Claire, at least not yet.

He offers her a ride to her destination, which is first an embarrassing stop at her sister Christine's day-job (a sort of live infomercial at a grocery store, which Claire has to act in) and a trying stop at a party at her mother's house. She leaves in a snit after an argument with Claire in tow and the three of them get hotel rooms in the nearest bit of city they find. Some very bizarre things follow. Claire can't sleep one night because of the loud music coming from a nightclub on the corner below. Jean, coincidentally, is in that very same club trolling for a victim; he finds two of them. They go back to Jean's car and while one of them strips in front of his headlights, he starts feeling up the other girl in the driver's seat. Just when it seems like he's going to kill her, Claire walks by and he stops. Neither speaks but Jean is mortified. The two women run off so he drives around alone, settling on a girl he finds on the side of the road instead. He drives to a beach and finds Christine swimming nude and when she tries to instigate a moonlit coupling he is resistant, asking instead if her sister is single. Not only is she single, says jilted Christine, she's a virgin. Back at the hotel Claire finds Jean's puppets and tries one of them, a wolf costume, on herself just as Jean comes back. The awkwardness of earlier in the evening returns, their roles reversed very subtly.

The next day Christine suggests they all go swimming at a lake just outside of town and as she's neither sensitive to Jean's attitude toward Claire nor privy to the incident in Jean's car from the night before. Christine, clearly feeling neglected and wanting to provoke from the stoic Jean, turns up the charm. And by charm I mean she takes her panties off and throws them at him from the water. It comes as little surprise when he throws her down on the wet sand and starts trying to have sex with her. When Claire finds them Jean sits by himself in the water and Christine is covered in sand and is hurt but not seriously. They try to get back to their car but Jean finds them first and essentially kidnaps them. He brings them back to his hotel room and fondles both of them in explicitly sexual ways but doesn't rape them. He locks Christine in the room and takes Claire with him to a dance somewhere, getting her stupid drunk before hand. Jean leaves her alone a minute and Claire meets two guys who invite them back to their place for a party. That may be the least appropriate way to describe what actually goes on. In total darkness they drink, eat, and try to screw each other while "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Bauhaus plays in nearly its entirety. It's totally strange and disconcerting and when one of them tries to rape Claire, Jean intervenes only to get the shit kicked out of him. Claire escapes and puts Christine on a train home.

Claire does not, as you or I might, call the police. Something about Jean's behavior in the dark house, his defense of her and the way that she is continually drawn to him causes her instead to drive back to find him. She finds him on the side of the road and tries to submit to him but there's a problem with that. Jean clearly cannot have ordinary sexual encounters with women. All of his murders start as foreplay and instead of finishing the act he kills them by placing his fingers in the way of their breathing passage. It's a penetrative surrogate sex act in and of itself which means that somewhere in his history something permanently fucked up his concept of eros. So, now faced with someone who only wants to have sex with him in a normal way and rebukes his attempts to do it his way, he has only the act and can't face Claire when it's done. He takes her and throws her in the shotgun seat of the next passing car and screams at the woman behind the wheel to leave him there. Claire is hurt but can't see it as a total loss. Jean is not an ordinary person so this cannot be an ordinary rejection. She invents their life story and shares it with the woman in the car, lies about their having been married for years, having children and many small squabbles in the past. In essence the life that Jean cannot ever have because of his murderous sexual psychosis. I've rarely if ever seen a serial killer explored in such a way. In fact the only thing that identifies Jean out to be a classically evil figure is the wolf costume that Claire finds (her wearing it makes him nervous and later when she is in control, in essence, wearing the wolf costume again, his reaction is much the same. He can't stand to not be a predator or be confronted with the failings in his nature, nor can he cope with her preying on him). Some people will cheat you out of objective murders by showing their serial killers as children (Pieces, Prom Night, Rob Zombie's Halloween), which is sort of a poor man's psychology course that tries to explain away how gruesome the movie will soon become. Grandrieux shows him as honestly as possible and explores his mental state in a way that, to my mind, has never been equalled or even approached in a genre film. He's also smart enough not to promise a happy ending despite Claire's strong feelings.

Now, what I just described to you regarding Jean's motivation is, to be fair, mostly my opinion. Philipe Grandrieux's style is fragmentary and does not offer anything like commentary. In fact it is Grandrieux's flat refusal to give the audience anything other than his ultra stylized take on the actions in his screenplay. If he has conclusions, he keeps them to himself. So the film is nearly dream like in its conjuring of the overwhelmingly dark images of sex and murder and Jean and Claire's inability to communicate. It's a touch like a David Lynch film (Lost Highway without the industrial aesthetic and the brutality toned down...and it's really a more satisfying and interesting film) in its isolated images relating to a greater theme. Take the headlight striptease. Something similar happens in Blue Velvet but David Lynch doesn’t ask you to buy its realism, so much as he asks you to accept it as an exaggerated and grotesque play on the serenity associated with suburban life (especially in the 1950s). Sombre takes the same kind of thing, makes it both (necessarily) darker and believable, and then revels in every awful second of it. That Sombre has a narrative that it sticks to even as apparent non-sequitors assault you is to its credit, as often David Lynch's best imagery does not remain within the confines of his story, though they relate to a greater theme. Grandrieux is simply interested in the darkest times in his characters experiences. The look of the film certainly demonstrates that. The movie is brilliantly shot; Sabine Lacelin's photography is gorgeous, in fact gorgeous sometimes doesn't do it justice, like those scenes at the lake. And with the exception of those scenes, everything is incredibly dark. If a room is in darkness or something happens on the side of the road, it really is as dark as those places get. In one of my favorite devices, Jean's victims often appear in his headlights, suggesting a chase has taken place. When Claire tracks him down after putting Christine on the train, he is in her headlights and so she retains control over the situation that follows, which makes his inadequacy all the more painful for him. It's a subtle and really effective idea. There's a uniqueness about its lighting; how often do wooded scenes not look like they've got floodlights overhead illuminating the action? And though its commitment to reality occasionally makes the screen almost black, I loved it. It keeps up with the atmosphere in a believable and non-manufactured way.

There are motifs throughout that suggest David Lynch and Jean-Luc Godard but the one person whose work I kept finding myself reminded of was Krzysztof Kieslowski. Keislowski was one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived and his films were unusually humane. He had the greatest sense of human behavior and emotional turmoil of any director before or after (Ingmar Bergman often approached it, Steve McQueen and Tomas Alfredson have since come close and of course Grandrieux does an amazing job). His best films were told in the same sort of discontinuous style and always had beautiful composition and photography. Sombre may then be thought of as the genre film Kieslowski never made. I'm being semi-facetious because in no way does Sombre follow anything like genre conventions; the point being that Kieslowski didn't make straight drama or comedy, he made honest human stories that transcended genre, place and time. Sombre is often as good (indeed better in some cases) as Kieslowski's work, which is about the highest praise I can think to give a movie. Grandrieux applies the same kind of intimacy of a movie like Bleu or The Decalogue to a character that most filmmakers couldn't bring themselves to sympathize with. It helps that the performances are all wonderful, from the bored sex workers to Jean's perfect ineloquence. There are wonderful moments that seem uniquely successful to Sombre, like the look on Christine’s face when she sees Jean after he attempts to rape her at the lake. That look is the definition of horror and Grandrieux lingers on it long enough to let us believe that she's staring at the most frightening thing in the world to her. We believe it not because of the overwrought musical score, or the Hitchcockian camera movements, or the Fucli-esque close-ups of his victim's eyes, or the shot of the serial killer himself, or any artifice whatsoever because there is none. We only get her reaction and it is priceless in execution and implication. Sombre is one of the only films that manages to straddle the divide between horror and art with no problem and it is beautifully haunting from start to finish.

Leave La France! Chapter 17: Death By Longing or My Favorite Film Number 12

It is October and though this look at French horror has gone on for two months now, there are a few more films to tackle before I can close the curtain, as it were. Today we look at a film that is special for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because this is my 200th movie covered since the start of Honors Zombie all those years ago when I was a bored high school senior looking to thumb my nose at the established school curriculum (metaphorically 'put my fist in 'em', if you will) and teach friends of mine about how zombie films are just as relevant as great pieces of literature in explaining the zeitgeist of the date of their release. David Cronenberg's Rabid, I would argue is just as rich a text as The Yellow Wallpaper when examining feminine roles in society. But then, my theories haven't exactly been adopted by the masses and taught at Ivy League schools, have they? So while the jury is still out on the relevance and/or sanity of some of my ideas, I would like to say that examining the history and thematic content of horror films is important. Texts don't have to be pedagogical to be informative, they can can in fact be pulpy and comic. And in order to appreciate their impact, one must examine their inception and their relation to other art works at the time. Which brings me to today's film, my 200th, and one of my absolute favorites. It has been called the greatest cinematic fairy tale and I wholeheartedly agree but I'd like to posit that it is also a fairy tale for adults because no matter how fantastic it gets, it's purpose is never outside of the ordinary. It is a film that even now, sixty three years after it's release at the time of my writing, has the uncanny ability to excite, mystify and enchant. I'll refer to it here by it's French title (cause I'm a prat) but you'll know it by the English title Beauty and the Beast. It seems fitting to start this by miming those oft-repeated signifiers of the fantastical as the director himself does at the opening of his film: Once upon a time... 

La Belle et la Bête
by Jean Cocteau

Belle is a poor country girl who lives to serve her father and (less favourably) her two piggish sisters. Her brother, Ludovico is 'a scoundrel and proud of it' and spends much of his time gambling and drinking with his friend Avenant. Avenant has had designs on Belle for sometime but she refuses his frequent proposals of marriage because she will not leave her father's side. He has fallen on hard times and his latest investment, cargo of some sort being transfered in a number of ships, has apparently dried up as none of the ships showed up. Creditors are breathing down his neck so when news that one of those ships has finally shown up, he rushes off to get it. Belle is happy to see her father in high spirits again, her sisters are happy because the wealthy lifestyle they've been faking can finally become a reality again, and Ludovico is happy because he's racked up serious gambling debts and needs his father's earnings to pay them off. Before departing, their father asks if they would like anything brought back from his trip. Belle, wanting to be humble, asks only for a rose, a request that though pure of intention (her sisters ask for a monkey and a parakeet) will wind up changing everybody's life.

The news of the ship turns out to be a wash as creditors have seized the cargo by the time the poor man arrives to collect it. He doesn't even have enough money to stay at an inn so, defeated, he rides home in the dark...or attempts to, I should say. Somewhere in the forest he happens upon an estate that looks to have fallen into slight disrepair, majestic though it seems. In fact there's something downright spooky about it; doors open for him before he reaches them and the entry way is lit by a row of disembodied arms supporting candelabra. The hands guide him to a dinner table set with finery and he is half-shocked, half-relieved when more arms serve him wine and food; he's so at ease in the strange place that he falls asleep. When he awakes, to the sound of an animal's roaring, not unlike a lion, he runs for the exit. Finding no master of the house present, he seems ready to leave but remembering his promise to Belle, he plucks a rose on his way out. This brings the master, a six foot tall beast with a lion's face and the clothes of a lord, around at once. He tells the old man that because he has stolen the rose, the thing he loves most, he shall now have to die unless one of the daughters he mentions feels like taking his place. Before the man can protest, the beast sends him off on an enchanted horse back to his house. When he's through explaining the terrifying detour to his children, Belle is determined to make up for her error. She leaves under cover of darkness for the beast's castle and prepares to accept her punishment.

Upon arrival, however, it seems that the beast wants nothing so much as to wait on Belle hand and foot (paw? You don't know tempted I am to make a pun on faux-pas, right now). He tells her that the castle is hers to explore and inhabit, dresses her in fine gowns (a little more tasteful than the ones her sisters insisted on wearing despite their poverty), provides her with sumptuous foods and the only thing he asks in return (other than not being able to leave) is for her hand in marriage every evening at dinner. Her will is strong and she puts off his proposals with the same persistence she once treated Avenant's, He seems to know that he has nothing in the aesthetic department to offer her but he worships the very ground she walks upon. Though it saddens him deeply to be rejected with such frequency he continues to ask. In the time that she stays there Belle and the beast grow to be friends and soon they have an understanding that borders on passion. By the time the beast has learned how to behave around Belle, she has grown so attached to him that she becomes cross when he's late for dinner. She also misses her home terribly and after much cajoling and promise making, he agrees to let her leave for a week but warns her that any longer and he shall die of grief. She wishes no such thing and so with a number of the beast's magical tokens, she returns to her father. His health, which had been failing thanks to his thinking that Belle had died on his behalf (and maybe because Ludovico's loneshark took most of their furniture and they have no money to buy medicine). Her sisters, who've been reduced to the kind of labour they used to force Belle to perform, are at once jealous and start scheming. Avenant is mortified about her affection for the beast and he's immediately on board for some whatever ruse the two vultures cook up. By the time Belle realizes that her sisters have stolen some of the beast's tokens (including a key he promises will unlock his greatest treasure), it may be too late for her to return in time to save him.

La Belle et la Bête is an incredibly important film for a number of reasons. It represents that rare time that the concept of 'love' is given the proper fantastical treatment. In reality, the notion is just as silly to think of as would a far-off kingdom where your dreams come true and Jean Cocteau, I believe realized that there was a good deal of power in his story. To let yourself be seduced by the world of La Belle et la Bête is to be persuaded that the idea of romantic love is very real. It's no wonder Walt Disney and a generation of bottom-line chasing television executives would use the story (originally by Lepince De Beaumont) for their benefit. Subsequent adaptation and most straight fairy tales have nothing of Cocteau's wonderful command of the story. For not only does the movie tell a beautiful story, it looks amazing and it is remarkably well-written. The images of the beast's castle are all amazing; the effect shots of the arms that 'dress and arrange Belle's hair' remain impressive and haunting. Everything in the castle is lit and shot imaginitively, making them all appear just as otherworldly as they're described. The beast himself is actually pretty well-executed. Jean Marais' face and visible appendages are covered in fur and it is rather conspicuous, but at the same time he has a dignity and frightening quality (an otherness that comes across in the full commitment to the make-up) missing from Lawrence Talbot or Will Randall. He needs that bit of dignity of course because we have to fall in love with him long before Belle does. Her trip home would be nothing but a detour through the first act again without the weight built in of his mental state. Cocteau can be forgiven for not making him a bit scarier (it was 1946, after all, there were only so many ways to make a beast) as we ultimately have to sympathize with him, but I like him all the same. Marais characterization is pretty excellent and there is a bit of the sexual fury one might expect in such a character. Nowhere near as vile as Walerian Borowczyk's take, Marais instead appears in front of Belle's door, his fur smoking (part of his legend stipulates it does so whenever he kills something), covered in blood and roaring like a lion. That stuff works doubly well because it mirrors the kind of romantic situation that so often crumbles under scrutiny. How often does the perfect man turn out to be an abusive brute? Tennessee Williams would got a lot of mileage out of the same notion. So did the makers of poetic realist films, a retroactively labeled genre of movies that ended with the onset of World War 2, largely because the makers of those films fled to America. Movies like Les Bas-Fonds, Le Jour Se Leve, Pépé le Moko, Le Quai De Brumes and La Bête Humaine all fetishized lost men prone to violent outbursts whom women tragically fell in love with. Marcel Carne's Les Enfants Du Paradis was seen as some as the genre's swansong, but I like to think of La Belle et la Bête is the more fitting concluding chapter in the saga as it flirts directly with fantasy, instead of just romantic love, and gives all of those lost men and sad girls the happy ending they never got, while also explaining why they were never supposed to work. It has much of the genre's template (tragic romance, temperamental hero, obscene amounts of hair-light) except that for once the female is the center of attention, though she's more often upstaged by Marais. It was the poetic realist film that embraced all the previously posed "what ifs" and second to Jean Renoir's Le Grande Illusion, it is more enjoyable than most of the classic poetic realist films (to clarify, I don't count Renoir's Le Règle De Jeu among those films, but I love it just as much). To see the sombre stories of the pre-war era come to a charming and transcendent post-war conclusion was a relief that French audiences needed. To see a character they liked and wanted to succeed fall victim to society and die before finding happiness was not an option now that such a tremendous tragedy had befallen the people of France; those characters, given such life by people like Jean Gabin and Marcel Dalio weren't just in the cinemas, they were on the streets and they needed a happy ending.

The 1946 release date brings with it implications that can't help but colour the narrative for better or worse. Nazism had just fallen, and the non-existent (or at least not filmed) kingdom of heaven that the prince offers Belle certainly carries more weight than just a typical fairy tale ending. As a gay man in France who'd just seen thousands of homosexuals murdered by a fascist regime, Cocteau was more than aware that dreams are not to be trusted. In fact before he started making films, he was well-known for a novella he'd written about 'deviant' sexual behavior that caused an uproar when it was first published in the 30s. He wasn't exactly in the fairy tale business at the start of his career as an artist. We can then see the brute man, hairy and violent yet elegant as an object of fantasy for both men and women (he never actually kisses Beauty, he simply stomps outside her door and holds her hand). Marais and Josette Day (who portrays Belle) both look as Aryan as can be and so a world where they can live with their dreams fulfilled is kept distinctly out of the realm of possibility (they exit in a cloud of mist or gas before their dream is fulfilled). Though Belle and her sisters have nordic builds and complexions, their father and Ludovico look like two Jewish men. Outsiders resigned to their lot in life, they live vicariously through Belle's experience with the beast, the king of deviants, who lives in a secluded and wonderful place, who, though bitter and lonely, is in thrall to no one and preys on deer to his heart's content. Marais' longing and distraction when he sees the stag is one of many excellent moments where he shines in his performance, even from behind all that make-up.

There's a cruciality to Marais portraying his three roles. As Avenant, he represents a handsomely mounted argument to leave her father (most likely to die) and become servile to his masculine wiles; in essence collaborating. As the beast, he is the world's forgotten and aberrant, living in exile, the problems of her dying father not really of any interest to him; tormented, persecuted, mocked, sexual, animal. As the prince in the conclusion, the answer supposedly to Belle's dreams, he is a strange compromise. They make reference to the fact that the prince is just a more attractive version of Avenant, which can be read a number of different ways, not the least of which is to simply be thankful for what you have. Avenant and the beast were in front of her for a long time and her indecision lead to a hybrid of the two, supposedly the best qualities of each. Of course that they then ride off into the clouds to a magical kingdom where she'll 'reunite with her father' (has he died?) and where 'her sisters will carry the train of her gown'. The notion of romantic love being perfectly fulfilled (she has her beast and her handsome french men in one elegantly dressed package) thus given the same magical quality as paradise, the same mystical place that thousands died believing they were headed to in the conflict whose death toll was still being calculated when La Belle et la Bête hit theatres. It's no coincidence that her dream is born out of the simultaneous death of both Avenant and the Beast. Cocteau's ending is thus a double-edged sword; we believe in the happy ending awaiting Belle behind all that smoke and the end titles because that is how fairy tales end and because we want her to have happiness but we also know that the idea of love being granted to a poor farm girl is just as ludicrous as anything else in the story and she may as well be headed for a mythic afterlife.

Of course, La Belle et la Bête isn't all morbid subtext. Cocteau's script is one of the most clever of the era. Cocteau doesn't get the credit he deserves for his wit (he was often called in to write the dialogue of other films when they lacked that extra something). The opening is a riot, with the deluded pauper girls trying to arrive at a party in a dignity befitting a wealth and class they no longer possess. Ludovico's comments to them are deft and hilarious pretty much throughout. Whenever Avenant interacts with the sisters, hilarity generally ensues as when Ludovico first urges Avenant to slap his sister, then staunchly defends her honor as soon as he's done it. His slightly drunk characterization is just as effective and believable as Marais' various turns and provides much needed respite from the shrewish sisters and the grave scenes with the beast. In this film is one of the earliest instances of dead-pan, Arrested Development-type humour I can remember seeing anywhere. Just after Belle's father comes home and announces they might once again be wealthy, Ludovico tries to turn the argument against Avenant, who moments earlier proposed to Belle. Belle's deadpan response after both men's histrionic accusations is perfectly executed and it's really very interesting to see such a well-worn, modern comic trope given the same kind of treatment it receives today to the same effect. I could see Jason Bateman delivering the same line just as well. Which brings me to my original point, that fuzzy monsters and romantic castles in the sky aside, this movie is as much for adults as for children. The richness of Cocteau's images and his dialogue has not subsided in the intervening years and I could see them captivating a child just as easily as they do aged critics and cranky cinemaphiles. I know of a good many twenty year old girls who adore the film because of its dream-like míse-en-scene and romantic storyline. The film has a nearly universal appeal because it's such an engrossing story, with razor-sharp writing, broad comic gestures that anyone can appreciate, a romance with a million different interpretations waiting to be discovered and because, no matter what's really going on, who doesn't love a fairy tale with happy ending?

Leave La France! Chapter 16: Death By Self-Indulgence

You know, sometimes it becomes all too clear that people haven’t really advanced all that far in our storytelling ideas. Look at a film like Let The Right One In, which is one of my absolute favorite films. It’s marvelous and I don’t know that anyone whose opinion can be trusted has disagreed with me in their assessment of it. It’s been adopted by the people who determine cult classics and championed by real critics; in one of the few instances of everyone being right, Let The Right One In is as extraordinary as everyone says it is. But when you break down it’s various elements it isn’t really too unusual. It’s alternately a tragic love story, a vampire story wherein a boy discovers that someone he knows is has a good reason for their strange behavior, and a clash between an underdog and many bullies, both societal and playground. Not all that different from a good many other films; it’s simply in the telling that the film becomes transcendent. However, it took the combined efforts of a director and screenwriter with something different and exciting to say about genre truisms to make such a great film and a really marvelous crew and cast with which to pull it off. Take any of those things out of the equation and you have a film that fails gallantly, but still fails. You need to care about telling an old story a new way, but sometimes you need more than determination, you need to understand what was wrong with the old way. The two films I’d like to discuss today, two of the most recent French horror films, were 'new spins' on old stories but didn’t differ from their influences in clever enough ways to make themselves vital or even necessary.

Sheitan
By Kim Chapiron

It’s Christmas Eve and Five twenty-somethings who could charitably be described as fuckheads, finish off a night at a club. Bart, the biggest fuck-up and horn-dog of the bunch gets a bottle in his face after hitting on someone with a boyfriend, and his friends (Thai, Ladj, Yasmine and Eve) have to carry him to the car. Eve invites them all back to her country estate, and seeing as no one has any money (they wind up stealing the gas it takes to get there), they all think a free meal and warm house sounds great. It helps that both Thai and Bart want desperately to get in Eve’s pants. They arrive just after dawn and are greeted by Eve’s handyman, Joseph (Vincent Cassel, the only actor in the cast worthy of the name) who creeps everyone out with his racist bumpkin shtick. The following twenty-four hours just get creepier and creepier and more offensive. Joseph seems to be obsessed with Bart (in a joke that gets less funny everytime it occurs, he keeps calling him Marc instead of Bart). Bart splits his time between wanting to fuck Eve and a local girl who reminds me of Daisy Duke via the family in Frontiere(s). After an incident at the hot springs where a bunch of local guys pick a fight with Bart, the kids decide to stick to Eve’s house for the remainder of their stay which they keep threatening to cut short. Finally after dinner where everyone argues about religion and Joseph tells a story about a guy sleeping with his sister who then has to surrender the resultant baby to Satan, everyone attempts to sleep with each other. When that fails for one reason or another (Yasmine’s bed fills with crickets for some reason, the kids from the hot springs show up to do. something vague and mean, Joseph spies on the budding three-way between Thai, Bart and Eve) things descend into chaos and suddenly that story that Joseph told turns out to be not just a story after all, but really who cares?

There’s a bit late in the film where Vincent Cassel’s character sees a couple of crows eating a rat. That’s not a bad analogy for this film: it’s one disgusting germy creature preying on another. White trash v. white trash, as it were, city kids clashing with unnerving yokels, attempting to one-up or at least join the canon of something like Texas Chainsaw Massacre. My big problem (hardly unique to this film) is that I couldn’t care less about anyone of the characters. They’re all (with the occasional exception of Eve) awful, awful people who deserve much worse than what they get. Worst of all, the film spends most of its running time showing you just how richly they deserve to get hacked to pieces by the gross clichéd hicks they so despise and then doesn’t punish them. In fact Bart, Thai and Eve are really the only people who seem to get any kind of comeuppance at all and no one conclusively drops on screen. They are all rather unlikable so I didn’t care about their mannerisms or the stories they tell or how much they want to fuck whoever, and that’s all director Kim Chapiron is interested in; the ostensible horror lies in shadows and implications and in the slightly creepy behavior of the natives. By the time the bed full of crickets shows up, the film has worn out its welcome in the atmospherics department; it should have gotten to the proper horror by now. Chapiron relies on things that aren’t at all scary like two dogs fighting. That isn’t scary, it’s just cruel and worrying, like most of the dialogue and set-pieces, which like the cinematography and set-design are simply hideous; there’s no comfort even in the little things.

I had hoped to find respite in Vincent Cassel’s performance, but alas. Now, I really like Vincent Cassel and he does try his very best with a role composed out of bits of stereotyped behavior, but he doesn’t have a good enough screenplay to work from and he’s simply too big a personality to be good in such a bad little film. Weirdly, Cassel must have really enjoyed the role because he also produced Sheitan; he even gave his wife, Monica Bellucci, a cameo in the horror film that the gas station attendant watches (on christmas eve?). Stranger still, Cassel plays his own sister when the big plot twist is revealed. When we get the plot explained to us and subtly leaks like so much placenta, there is then a completely unnecessary and time-eating dream sequence that I think is supposed to remind us of Sisters (harking back to Brian De Palma is never a good thing). The film puts you in close quarters with a bunch of broad and stupid character types and offers no respite, it just gets more grim and gross until the ending, which despite it's attempt at sickening black humour is really just as formulaic (and I might add nonsensical and arbitary, given the rules established by the script) as you might expect from a movie that spends the majority of its running time asking you to check out how funny rednecks and drug-addled dipshits can be.

So as you see, wanting to teach an old dog new tricks is not always easy. Being able to write is pretty crucial, and so, as we’ll see, is being able to direct. When our next film found its home on DVD in the states, it was hailed as the sickest and most intense horror film of the year. You’d think someone had reinvented the horror film from the way people prattled on and on about it and to be honest the gore effects aren’t even that impressive. In fact, for an underdog French movie with big ideas about the after-life, the film is utterly without style or grace.

Martyrs
by Pascal Laugier

Open on a nearly nude little girl fleeing an old warehouse, where, we will learn, she was imprisoned for quite some time. Then, in a rather clever opening titles sequence, we see the news following the girl’s escape, the story of how she was evidently tortured in captivity and how she was transferred to an orphanage and given psychiatric care. When the police show up to question the little girl (whose name is Lucie) her best friend Anna tells them that she’s hiding. She is much the worse for having been kidnapped, as I’m sure you can imagine and the thought of reliving it for the sake of the investigation doesn’t sit too well with poor Lucie. That night, she is visited by a monstrous figure that looks something like the feral child from Isidro Ortiz's Shiver, a terrific, under-appreciated Spanish horror film you’ve never seen, so nevermind that comparison…think Road Warrior’s the Humongous as a preteen. 

We then fast-forward fifteen years into the future where a suburban family goes about their humdrum morning routine. You just start to wonder what this lovely if slightly irritating bunch of squares has to do with this grim horror film when a twenty-something girl rings the doorbell and guns down everyone in cold blood. This is Lucie and it seems she hasn’t faired much better in the intervening years. After dispatching with everyone in the house, she phones Anna to tell her that she finally did ‘it’, that she was sure that this group of people were “them”. It takes a little unfolding, but Lucie is under the distinct impression that two of the four people she murdered at breakfast were her captors all those years ago. Before long Anna arrives and has to help her move the bodies but not before the feral kid shows up and beats the stuffing out of Lucie and cuts her up good with a razor. Anna, who has trained as an amateur doctor or nurse in the time between the prologue and the murder, tends to Lucie’s wounds and helps her move the bodies. When she sees that the mother is still alive, she’s torn. She doesn't want to kill anyone but she also doesn’t want to cross Lucie; she just slaughtered a family on a hunch, after all. Yet, if these people are really responsible for her friend's psychosis and paranoia, maybe they do deserve it. Lucie gets the upper hand and discovers that the mother is still alive and finishes her off before Anna has much chance to right her friend's rather horrifying wrong. Just when things quiet down, the feral kid shows up but this time Anna can see the attack and learns a little something about her friend that she’d probably already guessed at. Guilt has been playing a rather dangerous trick on Lucie, it seems. And as if that weren’t enough, Anna decides to press her luck by venturing into the basement and finds another feral child chained to the floor. We see that she isn’t so much feral as she is heinously tormented; she’s been, beaten, chained up, skinned alive and dehumanized. How do we know that this is what has happened? Because Anna’s about to learn who’s behind all this madness; perhaps most horrifying of all the revelations she becomes privy to is that she’s next.

Now, before anything else, let me offer director Pascal Laugier a piece of friendly advice. When you make a film this dark, that takes place in basements and warehouses, you might try turning a few lights off. With the exception of the opening shots and that wonderful credits sequence, the whole movie is flooded with light. There is not a shred of darkness or shadow in the whole film, which gives Martyrs the appearance of a rather sorry made-for-TV movie. The direction, editing, photography and sound design are hopelessly flat, so the effects are then rendered far less effective. And as long as we’re talking Brian De Palma (sorry, Pascal), I was reminded in the worst way of his and John Landis’ work in that the film lacks any artistic direction. It is completely unremarkable and so everything else becomes uninteresting. I couldn’t really find the gore that intense because you can see it all perfectly and it looks like just an obscene effect. At no point does anyone appear to have been actually harmed, they just like the victims of an over-eager make-up man. Martyrs also lacks the assault-like editing and stylistic cinematography of its peers and has a story so alienating and grim, where innocent girls are tortured until they cease to be human, that I simply couldn’t find anything to like about the movie. There is no hero and the last third of the movie is simply a regiment of flood-lit torture and beatings. I’ve seen beatings before, why would I want to see them divorced of plot? The international torture coalition that shows up isn’t so much because the film has questions that need answering, it’s just to justify the torture we’re about to see. The film runs out of ideas pretty quickly after this and so falls back on devices from other films. Take the musical score for example: the ending music cue is such a conspicuous crib of John Murphy’s climax of 28 Days Later I almost phoned a lawyer on his behalf. If you’re going to make a film about people being tortured to death (and that is what it is about, even if it makes grander claims to understanding guilt and what waits after death or anything else it never comes close to exploring) you had better have enough great ideas to keep my mind off the despicable nature of the plot and there just simply wasn’t enough thought put into the production to make its misanthropic premise work.

The whole notion of the capture ’n torture business is that some people figured out that people have a far away look in their eyes just before they die horrible painful deaths and that they want to see what they’re seeing in those last minutes before death. That’s an interesting idea, sort of, but I don’t see that an organization based around that idea could afford the kind of lavish torture basements that these guys do. Where are they getting the funding? When has something as violent and disgusting ever been able to captivate more than a bunch of hairy cultists? I don’t think that anyone this crazy could get away with kidnapping and killing people if they’re such a well-funded and organized group. The silliest bit is at the end when a bunch of well-dressed people assemble to hear about the outcome of their experiments with Anna; like there’s an international conglomerate of millionaires just dying to know what happens when you torture someone to death instead of sitting at home snorting coke with hundred dollar bills. The idea behind this is so self-indulgently faux-philosophical and lofty and Laughier clearly has no interest in exploring it, he just wants to film people getting flayed alive, which he can’t even do with the slightest panache. So, while Martyrs has a bit more creativity than ordinarily accompanies this much violence, a semi-cohesive narrative and a new spin on the same old torture doesn’t stop it from being rubbish.

Finally, I’d like to address something minor that’s been bothering me. The film starts by offering a dictionary definition of its title: “Martyr: Witness. From the greek Marturos.” No that’s incorrect. I get what they’re trying to say, but the word 'martyr' is no longer synonymous with the word 'witness' and in no dictionary will that be how it reads. The ecclesiastical Latin translation of the word Marturos led to the English word martir, which then took on the connotation it has today, but that took hundreds of years and dozens of small, protracted changes; nothing is equal to its latin root any longer, the root is just a blueprint. Just like I’m sure the script had a lot of promise that didn’t find its way into the finished film. That'd be like if I made a film called Kin and opened it by saying "Kin: To Give Birth To. Related to the Dutch Kunne." So yeah I get how that might be profound and tie into the plot but it’s fundamentally wrong and I really think that the director’s job is to make sure that kind of shit doesn’t make it into the finished film. If I could turn this into a ‘teachable moment’, I would say that a good idea is often not enough for a good film…or even a mildly entertaining one. I got no pleasure out of watching either Martyrs or Sheitan because long before they ran out of things to say, they had worn out their welcome with their general repugnance. Considering how easy it is to botch an idea, I’m amazed sometimes that we get the great films we do.

Leave La France! Chapter 15: Bad Influences

The french are not known particularly for their sci-fi. With the exception of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's output (which is decidedly hard to pigeonhole. There are sci-fi elements to be found in his first films, though it's a touch more antiquated and Fritz Langy in Delicatessen and City of Lost Children. Alien: Resurrection is most assuredly sci-fi, but it wasn't exactly his idea, was it? If 20th Century Fox drove a dump truck full of money to my house with a screenplay on top, you can bet I might not scrutinize it) there have been precious few cinematic journeys into the scientific and strange. It's fitting that the first real instance of Sci-Fi in France was a dissection of dystopian fiction mixed with noir called Alphaville by the master of audacious cinematic (ir)reverence Jean-Luc Godard. The man changed the face of cinema so I guess if anyone was going to make the country’s first genre picture it may as well be him. Leos Carax's Mauvais Sang followed much the same tack in 1986. Rene Laloux's animated film La Planète Sauvage is about the only thing produced in country that can be read as sci-fi until late into the first decade of the 21st century. And to make things even more incestuous the first of them was directed by none other than Marc Caro, Jeunet's co-director on Delicatessen and City of Lost Children. And as soon as they wrapped production (or possibly just before they started), Caro's first assistant director Franck Vestiel thought he might like to helm just such a project and started production on another quite like it. Neither is quite as good as they could have been, but they aspire to provoke thought which is more than can be said of most of their peers across the Atlantic.

Dante 01

by Marc Caro

Through voice over, we're told that everything begins in a primordial fire, just as we see the rockets of a space shuttle ignite. The woman's voice tells us that if someone were to examine their story, they could do worse than starting with the arrival of the shuttle. They, as we'll soon learn, are three scientists, two security guards and seven psychiatric patients. The shuttle is docking at a floating sanatorium orbiting a planet called Dante apparently engulfed in the fire of a thousand volcanos or some such thing. The narrator is one of the scientists and her name is Persephone. She uses phrases like "antechamber of hell", so you know what a blast this place must be. She and her colleague Charon are humourless and have clearly been out here too long. Their newest transplant, a doctor called Elisa, surmises as much the instant she meets them. Persephone and Charon fill Elisa in on the way things work, just as the same thing goes on with the inmates. Elisa isn't the only new transplant, you see, she also came with a freeze-dried inmate with no name. The new guy is weird-looking and doesn't talk. He meets the others as he defrosts; there's Cesar the de facto leader and the only face you'll recognize (he's Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon), Attila who's either under the thumb of Charon or vice versa, Raspoutine a doe-eyed zealot who believes the new guy is Saint Georges sent by god to defend them, Boudda whose religious beliefs lead him to offer to strangle the new guy to death and lastly Moloch and Lazare, two heavies who do Cesar's bidding because they seem to like bossing people around (the Crabbe and Goyle of the nut house, if you will). The regulars explain the what happens normally around the ship but they're are about to discover there's something nothing normal about either newcomer.

Charon has Atilla look into Elisa's file through a secret communication channel because back in the real world, using computers for evil was what the prisoner was best at. Before he can learn much, Elisa explains to Persephone and Charon that she has a new bit of therapy that 'the company' sent her to try out. It involves nanotechnology and she seems to think that by injecting tiny robots into the bloodstream of crazies she can modify their behavior. She gets her first opportunity when the staff gases the inmate's living quarters (which happens whenever they get too rowdy), putting them all to sleep and allowing the guards, CR and BR, to collect blood samples and bring one of them, Boudda, up into their lab. Charon is reluctant at first but agrees when she tries it on Boudda and he calms down significantly; Persephone wants no part of it. Boudda and the others see the incident as something else entirely. Before the gassing started, the new guy stood over him and had a vision wherein he saw an amphibious-looking arachnid not unlike a rubbery rendering of a face hugger from Alien, but bright orange instead of traditional grey, inside of his fellow inmate's chest. No one else can see what he sees and thus don't respond when the new guy pulls the spider out and eats it. Boudda and Raspoutine interpret the incident as the new guy, whom they nickname Saint Georges, performing a miracle by relieving his pain. Cesar, perhaps sensing that their support could mean an end to his reign of admittedly limited power, has Moloch and Lazare try to kill Saint Georges. Raspoutine intervenes and cuts Moloch's throat but following another of Saint Georges' visions, CR and BR can find nothing wrong with him when they gas the inmates to get a closer look.

These miracles begin affecting everyone. Persephone questions her belief in science and refuses to let Elisa put her nano-face huggers inside Saint Georges bloodstream. Charon overrules her and they try anyway but Saint Georges wakes from his sleep and escapes back into the inmates quarters. Cesar maintains that Saint Georges is evil until, one more spider-eating vision later, he cures the dictator of the nano-technology that Elisa gave him. Atilla finally finds out what Elisa's been sent here to do and responds by seizing control of the ship's controls and setting a collision course for Dante. They have about an hour before their on the fiery surface of the planet and the only way that Charon can see to save everyone is to get to the manual piloting chamber below the floor of the inmates quarters, which means confronting them for the first time. Elisa, of course, has her own plans and so for that matter does Saint Georges.

With all famous partnerships that break up, the tendency is to try and examine their solo work to determine who brought what to the table. When Caro split from Jeunet, he did precious little before Dante 01, giving us ample time to figure out that what exactly he had contributed to their two collaborations. Jeunet clearly was responsible for the touching, quirky romances and heart-warming friendships at the core of their films, whereas the bug-eyed weirdness and confrontational, claustrophobic angles were all courtesy of Caro. Which means that the geniuses at 20th Century Fox took the wrong co-director to make Alien: Resurrection. If Caro had been put in charge, the result may have been salvageable, as it was clearly he who had the killer instincts required to handle the more grim and gooey aspects of the movie. Coincidentally or not, the one film that comes immediately to mind when I think of possible influences on Dante 01 is David Fincher’s Alien³. Like in that film misshapen bald heads, amber-tinted production design, gothic prison sets, and a plot set in motion by the arrival of a visitor are all present. I rather liked the look of Alien³ and so consequently enjoyed the look of Dante 01, even if those common design elements and the frenetic quality of the action have been turned up to 11. Like Fincher, Caro used a specific and beautiful look in order to better spin a yarn steeped in religious thought and ancient tales involving dragons, juxtaposing the timeless with the ‘futuristic’.

Fincher, of course, had a stout 150 or so minutes with which to give his gorgeous production design all the attention it deserved. Caro had 81 minutes and a hell of a lot more story to tell. Yet, all in all, Dante 01 is a much better movie than both Alien³ and Alien: Resurrection because it moves at too quick a pace for you to get bogged down in its unanswered questions and biggest flaws. In fact, if I have one problem with Dante 01 it’s that it doesn’t address its biggest mystery. We know right from the start that Saint Georges is no ordinary prisoner, and we also know that Elisa is up to no good and yet we learn nothing about either of them. Elisa clearly knows something’s up with him, she was sent in the same shuttle with him to that big psych ward in the sky, and the company trusts her enough to let her administer bloodspiders so why doesn’t she know anything about Saint Georges’ abilities? Does no one know that he has psychic power? What do they allow him to do exactly; can he heal anything? The ambiguity is not unwelcome, per se, as this is a sci-fi film and I would have rioted in the non-existent aisles if someone had sat us down at the end to let us know exactly what we’ve been watching. Really I don’t mind so much, it’s just that Caro had crafted a neat little potboiler and I expected him to be able to answer some of the more pressing questions he poses. I don't think it would have taken away from the film’s greatest strengths to learn where Saint Georges came from or whether he was supposed to figure into some larger plan or other.

Marc Caro’s first assistant director Franck Vestiel must have liked the taste of sci-fi films with more questions than answers he got while working on Dante 01 because his own take on the genre followed shortly after. The only problem is that if he came up with any answers at all he sure didn’t feel like sharing.

Eden Log

by Franck Vestiel

We open a man covered in mud who, for like two hours, crawls through a cave to the entrance to a big labyrinthine facility. He is greeted at the entrance by a myriad of voices, each in a different language, welcoming him to Eden Log. He goes inside and works his way up several stories, via broken ceilings, vents and elevators that no person could be expected to fit through. Along the way he picks up several clues as to what’s going on, even if he doesn’t understand them; I think he’s got amnesia but seeing as the man never says a word it’s pretty hard to tell one way or the other what’s going through his mind. Anyway, he finds recordings made just before whatever catastrophe killed everybody took place alongside people who seem to have fused with giant plants before dying. Shortly after he finds two things that give him irrefutable evidence that whatever was going on in Eden Log was not on the level. First are the armed guards who seem to know who he is and try to apprehend him. Second are the Descent-style mutants waiting for him around every corner.

Just before things start to get super-repetitive, our mudman comes across a botanist or biologist or some such ologist, who hides out in her apartment in a HAZMAT suit. She runs some tests on him and she doesn’t like what she sees. I think what we’re supposed to gather from this is that he’s got a higher predisposition towards turning into a tree or a mutant. She tries to flee, leaving him to die at the hands of the mutants, but he catches up to her and then rapes her in a service elevator. Maybe. It’s hard to tell, but he keeps roaring and grimacing and she alternates between seeming to enjoy it and clearly not. Afterwards, they join forces to evade the soldiers, but they both wind up caught anyway. The ending makes little to no sense, even if it looks kinda cool.

I think what’s going on here is that the man from the mud is actually the architect or president of Eden Log, so it’s totally fucking ironic that he’s like in the mud and being attacked and shit, right? No, that part doesn’t make any sense. If he’s actually important, why does no one recognize him? Why do the soldiers initially try to kill him? Why doesn’t the botanist speak to him by name? Moreover, what’s the point of Eden Log (the facility, not the film. Although....)? What work was being done before the great mutant-causing, tree-mating cave-in? If these are the side-effects of working there, I can’t imagine anyone paying millions of dollars in grant money to open this place. Also, there are a number of crucial design flaws which I’m sure were designed simply because they looked cool: anytime we find a recorded message, it’s projected on the spot where it was also recorded. This makes no sense from a technological standpoint. Why would you want a recorded film to project on your face, instead of on the wall opposite? Why did some people turn to mutants and others to trees? How did our man end up in the mud, way the hell away from everyone else, if he’s so important? Just what is he doing at the end of the film, other than miming that scene from Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain? Was Eden Log designed for that, or was he doing something illegal? This is a movie where the proposition of questions was, aside from production design, the most important thing on the agenda. Everything kinda crumbles under scrutiny.

Vestiel, whose movie is in his second language, is almost as bad at directing extras as Jean Rollin. The dialogue that the soldiers deliver is so stilted and hackneyed that it feels stolen from a video game, along with the plot. The mutants feel lifted in much the same way. They look like their more vicious older brothers from Neil Marshall’s The Descent, yet pose no threat because our mudman lays them out with little to no problem whenever he encounters them. One of the film’s greatest problem is that the majority of its set-pieces are borrowed or stolen, and together they retain nothing of their original power because they have to fit into the weak storyline. Clearly Vestiel put a lot of thought into the look and feel of the film, and its best images, those of the treemen and half destroyed laboratories, are really quite stunning. I just wish he had either let someone else direct or given the script a little more thought.

So neither film has all the answers to the many questions they pose, but a film that seems to designed to make you think about anything is better than one that insists you shut your brain off. These films were given direct-to-dvd releases, by Dimension Extreme and Magnet Releasing respectively, in the states presumably because they couldn’t secure theatrical distribution. Let me just say that in the summer of 2009 alone theatres in the United States were hit with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Gamer and Terminator: Salvation, so I’m a little pissed off at America right now. Personally I think Eden Log would have done pretty well with the teenage boy set in this country, what with it’s chic boiler room set design, video game plot devices, and faux-philosophical subtext; It could have been the next Matrix. Apparently I wasn't the only one who thought so because Christian Alvart's Pandorum, a film produced by Paul W.S. Anderson or as I like to call him The Greatest Living Filmmaker, is a pretty flagrant rip-off. We have guys in a big Alien-esque environment who don't know anything. There are Descent-style mutants with Road Warrior costumes, a lot of destruction, a botanist/biologist love interest, silly ass fight scenes and a big profound ending. So despite my issues with it someone somewhere thought Eden Log was cool enough to steal from and erase all of its subtlety in the process. Well, I guess it’s been a hundred years and stateside audiences still can’t quite cope with foreign films so I’m stuck a pessimist’s optimist. People don’t realize that there are films they might quite enjoy if they’re willing to read; they don’t have to settle for Michael Bay or Paul W.S. Anderson.