Flesh & blood: sex and violence in recent French cinema

THE CONVULSIVE VIOLENCE OF BRUNO DUMONT'S fresh FILM Twentynine Palms (2003)--a trade ramming and a savage male rape, a fall into madness followed by a frenzied knifing and suicide, all crammed into the movie's last half hour after a lengthy somnolent buildup--has dismayed many, particularly those who addressed Dumont's first two features, Life of Jesus (1997) and L'Humanite (1999) as the work of a authentic heir to Bresson. Whether Pahns' paroxysm of violation and death signals that Dumont is borrowing the digests of Hollywood horror films to further his exploration of material part and landscape or whether it barely marks a natural intensification of the raw, dauntless corporeality of his previous films, it nevertheless elicits an unintentional anxiety: that Dumont one time imperiously impervious to fashion, has succumbed to the growing mode for shock tactics in French cinema above the past decade.

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The critic truffle-snuffing for stretchs might call it the novel French Extremity, this recent propensity to the willfully transgressive by the agency of directors like Francois Ozon, Gaspar Noe, Catherine Breillat, Philippe Grandrieux--and now, alas, Dumont Bava as abundant as Bataille, Salo no les than Sade present the appearance the determinants of a cinema on a sudden determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and sprays of sperm, to fill each frame with muscle and fat nubile or gnarled, and make subordinate it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement. Images and make subordinates 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 greatest in quantity immoderate (Franju, Bunuel, Walerian Borowczyk, Andrzej Zulawski), at least assimilable as emanations of an artistic motion (Surrealism mostly). Does a kind of irredentist spirit of incitement and confrontation, reviving the hallowed Gallic traditions of the film maudit, of epater le bourgeois and amour fou account for the collision tactics employed in recent French cinema? Or do they bespeak a cultural crisis, forcing French filmmakers to reply 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 diocese the Sea (1997), alternates oblique terror with percussion shots--of a toothbrush dipped in a shit-filled toilet or the subliminal suggestion of a sutur vagina. Ozon shielded it and the outre nature of his Criminal Lover (1999) a cros between Natural Born Killers and "Hansel and Gretel" abrupted 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 stalwart 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 below the Sand (2000), starring an exquisitely anguished Charlotte Rampling--but to the nascent enfant terrible whose each kink was calculated (especially in the screeching satire of Sitcom [1998]) morality strike one as beinged a canard, a pretext for provocation. Certainly, his films not at any time approach the unsettling vision of his hero, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who could traumatize audiences simply by means of 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 the agency of clear-eyed empathy and sociological insight. Denis disdains these traditional virtues in disorder Every Day (2001), a horror display in which Beatrice Dalle is cast for her ravenous jaws as Core, a cannibal sated alone when she consumes the bodies of her hapless lover An enervated Denis barely musters a hint of narrative to contain or explain the orgiastic bloodletting; a shadow plat involving Vincent Gallo as an American doctor struggling with his possess bloodlust while on honeymoon in Paris is the couple cursory and ludicrous. Denis's grand cinematographer Agnes Godard, responsible for the ravishing images of Beau Travail (1999) here trains her camera upon landscapes of flayed flesh, upon Dalle's tumid lips and in want of food tongue aswim in crimson, and upon walls artfully spattered with life-current (The Pat Steir--like sprays of incarnadine remind us that the French can at no time abandon their tendency to aestheticize level 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 discharge in Bertrand Bonello's The Pornographer [2001] is proudly described as having been inspired by dint of "Rothko at the Grand Palais.")

Cannibalism and mutilation move round autoerotic in Marina de Van's first appearance film, In My Skin (Dans ma peau, 2002) De Van coscripted diocese the Sea and starred as its dead-eyed enormity a domestic intruder whose psychosis, according to director Ozon "confound 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 obsess with the pleasure she finds in her suppurating injurys Compulsively cutting herself with knife or razor, Esther delect in her be in possession of flesh, mutilating and hungrily tasting an arm or tanning a swatch of epidermis in her search to test the boundaries between self and world.