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Flesh & blood: sex and violence in recent French cinema
ArtForum, Feb, 2004 by James Quandt
THE CONVULSIVE VIOLENCE OF BRUNO DUMONT'S NEW FILM Twentynine Palms (2003)--a truck ramming and a savage male rape, a descent into madness followed by a frenzied knifing and suicide, all crammed into the movie's last half hour after a long, somnolent buildup--has dismayed many, particularly those who greeted Dumont's first two features, Life of Jesus (1997) and L'Humanite (1999), as the work of a true heir to Bresson. Whether Pahns' paroxysm of violation and death signals that Dumont is borrowing the codes of Hollywood horror films to further his exploration of body and landscape or whether it merely marks a natural intensification of the raw, dauntless corporeality of his previous films, it nevertheless elicits an unintentional anxiety: that Dumont, once imperiously impervious to fashion, has succumbed to the growing vogue for shock tactics in French cinema over the past decade.
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The critic truffle-snuffing for trends might call it the New French Extremity, this recent tendency to the willfully transgressive by directors like Francois Ozon, Gaspar Noe, Catherine Breillat, Philippe Grandrieux--and now, alas, Dumont. Bava as much as Bataille, Salo no less than Sade seem the determinants of a cinema suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement. Images and subjects once the provenance of splatter films, exploitation flicks, and porn--gang rapes, bashings and slashings and blindings, hard-ons and vulvas, cannibalism, sadomasochism and incest, fucking and fisting, sluices of cum and gore--proliferate in the high-art environs of a national cinema whose provocations have historically been formal, political, or philosophical (Godard, Clouzot, Debord) or, at their most immoderate (Franju, Bunuel, Walerian Borowczyk, Andrzej Zulawski), at least assimilable as emanations of an artistic movement (Surrealism mostly). Does a kind of irredentist spirit of incitement and confrontation, reviving the hallowed Gallic traditions of the film maudit, of epater les bourgeois and amour fou, account for the shock tactics employed in recent French cinema? Or do they bespeak a cultural crisis, forcing French filmmakers to respond to the death of the ineluctable (French identity, language, ideology, aesthetic forms) with desperate measures?
An outrider of French extremity, Ozon's first feature, the suspense thriller See the Sea (1997), alternates oblique terror with shock shots--of a toothbrush dipped in a shit-filled toilet or the subliminal suggestion of a sutured vagina. Ozon defended it and the outre nature of his Criminal Lovers (1999), a cross between Natural Born Killers and "Hansel and Gretel," steeped in sexual pathology and cannibalism, this way: "What I am interested in is violence and sex, because there is a real challenge in rendering the strong and powerful, as opposed to the weak and trivial. I like something that asks moral questions." Ozon has since matured--e.g., the classical, contained Under the Sand (2000), starring an exquisitely anguished Charlotte Rampling--but to the nascent enfant terrible whose every kink was calculated (especially in the screeching satire of Sitcom [1998]), morality seemed a canard, a pretext for provocation. Certainly, his films never approach the unsettling vision of his hero, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who could traumatize audiences simply by confronting them with uncomfortable truths.
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Fassbinder's painful verities about race and abasement also inspired Claire Denis, whose Chocolat (1988) and No Fear, No Die (1990) are distinguished by clear-eyed empathy and sociological insight. Denis disdains these traditional virtues in Trouble Every Day (2001), a horror show in which Beatrice Dalle is cast for her ravenous mouth as Core, a cannibal sated only when she consumes the bodies of her hapless lovers. An enervated Denis barely musters a hint of narrative to contain or explain the orgiastic bloodletting; a shadow plot involving Vincent Gallo as an American doctor struggling with his own bloodlust while on honeymoon in Paris is both cursory and ludicrous. Denis's superb cinematographer Agnes Godard, responsible for the ravishing images of Beau Travail (1999), here trains her camera on landscapes of flayed flesh, on Dalle's tumid lips and hungry tongue aswim in crimson, and on walls artfully spattered with blood. (The Pat Steir--like sprays of incarnadine remind us that the French can never abandon their tendency to aestheticize even when aiming to appall; the paintings of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are invoked in Patrice Chereau's Intimacy [2001] and Philippe Grandrieux's La Vie nouvelle [2002], and an eleven-second cum shot in Bertrand Bonello's The Pornographer [2001] is proudly described as having been inspired by "Rothko at the Grand Palais.")
Cannibalism and mutilation turn autoerotic in Marina de Van's debut film, In My Skin (Dans ma peau, 2002). De Van coscripted See the Sea and starred as its dead-eyed monster, a domestic intruder whose psychosis, according to director Ozon, "confounds the anus and the vagina." In Peau, de Van's ashen, impassive features become a Noh mask in her rendering of Esther, a young research analyst who accidentally slices her leg during a party and becomes increasingly obsessed with the pleasure she finds in her suppurating wounds. Compulsively cutting herself with knife or razor, Esther delects in her own flesh, mutilating and hungrily tasting an arm or tanning a swatch of epidermis in her quest to test the boundaries between self and world.
