It's touching the way both father and fake "son" struggle to maintain this illusion. Seeing a computer-aged picture of Vincent's lost boy that shows he'd be about her age now, she binds her breasts and stomach, chops off her hair and eyebrows, gives herself a hard-t0-watch beating and breaks her own nose, and turns up as the fire chief's lost son, Adrien. As time goes on, the masochism and the body horror keep ramping up. We have seen seven-year-old Alexia (Adèle Guigue) get titanium in her head after a car crash (the no-nonsense dad driver a cameo by director Bertrand Bonello), then kiss the restored car on the way out of the hospital, then, two decades later, turn into the bizarre erotic dancer-cum-serial killer who has sex with a Cadillac and gets dangerously pregnant with a growing critter in an amniotic fluid of motor oil. But she's dementedly wound up in what she's doing, and the simple but effective thing she does do here as in Raw is ramp up the volume and keep it that way. Ducournau seems more enthusiastic than competent as a director. It's a touching and pathetic one that we can't scoff at, no matter how much body horror stuff there is here and sheer absurdity and shifting of plot focus. The tall former model Agathe Rousselle, who plays the adult Alexia, the crazy metal-impregnated lesbian tomboy-flirt, a hood-top erotic dancer at car shows, who then becomes a serial killer, would not own the audience's affections were it not for Lindon and the bond that develops between them. Lindon's bereft dad and fire chief makes all the difference. He doesn't appear in the film till half way through, but when he does, the film develops a human pulse. An audacious body horror thrill ride with loneliness and needĬritics have heralded Ducournau's late-coming sophomore shocker and, according to the review aggregators rotten tomatoes and Metacritic, like it considerably less well than her 2016 debut Raw (R-V 2017), even though it got the Palme d'Or at Cannes (only the second woman in Cannes history - after Jane Campion - ever to do so) but I differ from most critics and the public in liking this one better.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |