First long of the French couple exiled in BrusselsHélène CattetandBruno Forzani, Ameris now available onShadowz. The ideal opportunity to evoke the surrealist fable feminist, at the confluence between Lynch and Argento. So lower the light, and let yourself be told the story of Ana...
Eyes of childhood
Eye. The eye is everywhere inAmer. In the credits, eyes. In a lock, an eye. In close-ups, alone or in pairs. Camouflaged in the decor. In pareidolia against walls stained with moisture. Just painted. Or appearing in collage on a statue. Eyes everywhere.AmerisEye History. The story of one eye, that of Ana!
First little girl. The curious eye, dropped into the terrifying world of adults, between a distant mother, a labyrinth house and a good one would have extracted from the limbs of a nightmare. The images are already there – wet, salt, blood – but the childish brain does not decipher them. Only the reminiscences remain and there is a terror. A fear that incarnates in monochrome plans, suddenly turning her little girl's room into a colorful expressionist nightmare. The shades poison the decor, simmer skin textures and end up infiltrating everywhere, like the fear of Ana.
Then comes the inevitable voyeuristic impulse. Girl, knee, face at lock height. Eyes as the only key – both clean and figurative – because in this scene lies the essence of the entire feature film. The egg eye, ready to throat with the seminal image, torn out through this lock: its parents, naked, sighing sighs. Surprise in front of the obscene, but too late. The image is here. Printed against the retina. Indelibly engraved in the synapses of the brain, still too young of Ana. Egg eye was fertilized. Only a short teenage gestation remains before the outbreak of fantasy, a duration eclipsed by a film that jumps directly to an older Ana, walking hand in hand with her mother.
Adolescent eye
From inside the mansion, we go outside. Sky azure, rib torn, road in endless laces. Only a house built of eagle nest would be missing and we would be sure to find ourselves inThe Mepris. A tender ear, one would almost hear, over the broom, the voice ofPiccoli Repeat how much he loves them, his buttocks,Bardot. But neither Ana nor her mother listen, they walk, they move away. Get down to the sea. Hands split. The bond breaks. Adolescence teares apart what remains of these invisible threads that still attach to her brood, Ana feels magnetized, knows the effect that this dress raised by the wind makes to the boys, hard to hide the rotondity of her breasts that inflate her chest. Her body betrays her. Trahit the bubbling of his thoughts. Trahits the cravings that tear his ass apart. Trahits the fear that she feels in front of her eyes – a man, a kid, a group of bikers – who expose her to their minds. Who try to possess it by the look. Now we're back to the eye again.
She's playing with that kid who looks too young. Aeroticism seems to bother her as much as it makes her excited. An excitement that will put them in motion in a chase after a ball, where the camera loses the spectator: who follows who? Who follows what? Soon, the landscape ofDisgustBurn. The image is burning. The saturation invades the film in this strange sprint soon ended by a sting, sound, when she finds herself again facing her mother. A scandalized mother, maybe. More certainly terrified of seeing his daughter – hissmallGirl – innocently paddling in front of this kid. Then in front of these libidinous bikers, crossed on the way. Epidermal reaction. Desperate attempt to remind at the age of child her teenage girl who escapes her. The eye is still there, or rather the eyes. Many. Hit Ana. And if the egg eye is ready to hatch, if the fantasy point, the childhood residue still protects it. But not for long...
Adult eye
Second ellipse. Bodies filmed too close. A deafening, dissonant music. Meat, hair. Spasmodic movement, unpleasant. Irritating. Terrific. Rape is obviously suggested by the camera, before being swept away by a zenithal plane showing an older Ana, stuck between the bodies of sweating men, delighted to approach her skin, feel her forms against theirs, crush her in the promiscuity of a crowded bus. The masculine mass seems to want to pagocytize her. Pornographic memories. She can't anymore, she has to get out. Extract. And sigh on the dock, spit on the edge of the street, forced on the taxi.
OneKurt RussellGet in here, or his face. His BMW is not the Chevrolet NovaBoulevard of Death, but the idea is there. Also eye, inquisitor, rendered omniscient by the central mirror. Ana tries to lower her skirt too short along her bare thighs, bitten by the burning leather of the taxi, pinched by the driver's constant glances. The privacy of the passenger compartment replaces the rubbing hordes, but the discomfort is the same. Their indiscreet caresses: a constant burn. Air becomes suffocating. Until the blow of a prank that teares her dress, releases her breasts, exposes a triangle of flesh polarizing all eyes. Fantasy vision, nightmare. Fugitive but catchy. The car spits her out again, healthy and safe but assailed on all sides, dirty.
Ana titube in the garden of her old house. Catching upin extremisthe trunk of a tree, maculating its hand with a white and sticky pitch. The metaphor will be spun or not. LFarewell to languagereached here its climax, in a film so far already largely mutic. She is now alone in the empty corridors of her childhood home. Alone. Ana is back in the anterior where the eye has been fertilized and the reminiscences already haunt the house. Floors crack. Moving shadows seem to detail it –AlwaysHey! – while she dened herself to cover herself in a bathtub.
Water point, Ana fills her with tears. Or wet. Whatever, whether it flows from the eye up or down, it now lies in saline water. The enjoyment unlocked by a comb.
Before a hand, invisible, black, pushes its head under water now. Ana lacks a little time to stay, but manages to escape and lock herself in her room. The parallel with the little girl is obvious. Except when it spies through the lock hole –still– it is not the naked bodies of her parents she sees, but she herself. Soon, the night air is clouded with walking noises, the corridors fill with sighs of a decidedly revanchard spectrum... We want his skin!
Torve eye
Ana thus finds herself between the hammer and the anvil. On one side, a man avidly stalks her. From the other, her shadow, gloved with leather, her hand extended by a hemoglobin-loving chorus cutter. On one side the penetrating, the rapist, on the other the unconscious sum of his socially imposed fantasies whose brains were only hatchery. Necrosis everywhere. I'm annihilating. Yet Ana does not get rid of herself. Tent it all for everything. And soon, it is blade in hand and califourchon on the male that it is. The dominated becomes dominant.
The prisoner body of man tries to struggle, but the sharpness calms it. Metallic cliques against the teeth, the razor thread runs over the claws, threatens a time, then slices. The mouth, first. This place where whistles come out, insulting quolibets, poisonous insult. Then the emasculation will not delay, almost immediately accompanied by a blade planted straight in Adam's apple. Ana the chater of all her virility oripeaux and deprives him of any possibility of rape, in a hyper-sensory scene that will only make the spectator shout his teeth. The pain of the image, contaminates those who look at it. Of this man remains only the eye as a rapist extension. Of course. Over and over again. The edge still hesitates. Perhaps he should have hesitated longer? He ends up in the shadows. Ana, stabbing her double, kills herself. The last breath and then death.
Only the coldness of an inanimate body remains. Ana, still naked, flesh resting on the coldness of stainless steel from an autopsy table. Gloved, masculine hands emerge out of the field. Sponge. Water. Like a piece of meat, Ana's back. His intimacy again exposed. Even dead, even dispossessed of everything, she remains and will remain the object that the male gaze wants her to be. Only a aftertaste, in the mouth... A bitter aftertaste!
Bravo for the article that looks like it transcribes the states in which the viewer is immersed. You made me want to see him.
Thank you very nice movieo that this couple of French 😉 I look forward to discovering "the strange color of the tears of your body"!
You made me want. I think I'll find out soon withL !