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Julia Ducournau
French/Berber director whose one consistent theme, so far, is to use body-horror as metaphor for social commentary, or sometimes just to embody a graphic Cronenbergian fascination with all things flesh. In her films, flesh becomes the outer layers of our humanity, to be shed in clinical detachment and a series of shocks. Sometimes the metaphor is straightforward, other times she bolsters her vision with pure surrealism. In her third outing, Ducournau dials back on the shock tactics for a more straightforward, but often-covered metaphor for AIDS. There's an unnamed disease running rampant, turning people into actual hard marble. It seem to affect mostly people that are not careful with needles, or homosexuals, but this doesn't stop a mother from worrying over her daughter. She works as a doctor taking care of these sick people at the hospital, and her brother is an infected drug-addict who wouldn't mind dying to stop his suffering, but his sister insists on keeping him alive. At the center is Alpha, her daughter, stigmatized because of her family and her connections to the virus, especially after getting a bad tattoo with a dirty needle. The film covers the social stigma and scared/horrified teenagers at school, the intense suffering of the sick, and their family and lovers. But it's not merely a sci-fi exploration of AIDS with bizarre effects on the body, it also adds many surreal touches that bolster the drama: A scary outside world that literally shake, walls literally closing in, a girl who is both a teenager and a little girl depending on her mother's emotional state, some dreams and nightmares, and a poetic dusty end of crumbling marble and stone. The popular art-house-horror theme of a girl's coming-of-age is often depicted using either surrealism or horror motifs, and here it is given a bizarre treatment, this time using cannibalism. A teenage vegetarian girl is sent to a very wild veterinary college that is run more like a boot-camp for party-animals and perverts rather than for doctors. Her wild and sexual side emerges, except in the form of a literal lust-for-flesh. Her older sister tries to guide her, but is lost in her own lusts and hungers. The first part of the movie made me think of Wetlands and seems to be more interested in shocking its audience with a wide variety of gratuitous scenes including shoving a hand up a cow's rectum, and a hazing ritual that reaches near-surreal proportions. But the theme of a girl's psychological and physical changes gradually emerges, along with new wild discoveries of her body, and uncontrollable gory bites of anyone and everyone. Unfortunately, this movie, although filmed and put together very well, has nothing new to say on femininity besides upping the shock factor, and comparing a woman's lusts to cannibalism doesn't really provide insight. At least Ginger Snaps was entertaining, whereas this was more about rocking the boat. Reportedly, this had some audience members fainting. Julia Ducournau's follow-up to her body-horror, coming-of-age provocation Raw/Grave is another body-horror provocation, but an insane one. It's one of those movies you'll watch just to see what it does next, and this is by design. Assuming you enjoy extreme movies that is. Alexia is a bad child whose first love is a car that almost kills her and puts a metal plate in her head. She grows up to be a psychopathic relentless serial-killer that can only get turned on by cars and who kills everyone else. This is not another Crash however, but an idea taken to an absurd extreme involving car-sex (with, not in) and car-pregnancy (don't ask, all I'll say is that it involves lots of motor oil). The second half of the movie has her pretend to switch gender so that a man who lost his little boy will adopt her. Except this man is also insane; a fireman with a steroid problem and a mental problem that desperately sees his boy in this psycho no matter how absurd it becomes. Believe it or not, emotions develop between them. Unlimited, unconditional, unhinged emotion, where an unlovable machine of an inhuman non-woman is supported by a ridiculous father's insane need to love. Audiences that read into this all kinds of gender issues or statements, or some other kind of meaning, are barking up the wrong mad tree. This is simply body-horror for its own sake, combined with a drive to provoke and surprise audiences, and with emotions added on just because they are applied to an inhuman being with a human body. |
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