Jonquil ‘Jonny' Baptiste is a careless teenager who will have to live with her aunt. On the day of her 18th birthday, she was subjected to a mystical metamorphosis following a family spell, the Forevering. After several teenage girls from high school mysteriously disappeared, ‘Jonny's mission is to track down the Perpetrator. Back on this film full of good intentions but as clumsy as the young adults in the future that it stages. Presented at Gérardmer's fantastic festival, the session soon dubbed our enthusiasm...
The sorority for the losers
Perpetrator comes from Latin and directly refers to the word « Perpetrator »He who commits a crime. Very involved in defending women's rights, Jennifer Reeder here signs a film imbued with the air of time for the best but especially for the worst. Teen movie who eats to all the rakes, Perpetrator claim his kinship with the body horror and quite naturally Cronenberg, which he never manages to touch.
Ended like a floppy, the film condemns itself to a waste of misguided values. The metaphors are so crude and unsubtle that the image is systematically associated with an indigestible explanation of text and dialogues of distressing poverty. And let's not talk about the acting game that a bad B series would not deny. Men managed to produce a sensitive, though imperfect, discourse on toxic masculinity, Perpetrator failed on almost every level, the fault of an activist agenda that drowned the film's words in a palette of good values worthy of the club of the five.
Jennifer Reeder Here seeks to reverse the archetypes of patriarchy by choosing a group of girls who are in solidarity following the disappearance of one of them. Understand that femicide and its derivatives, rape, are a common violence that saves no one from any social background. Thriller without suspense or audacity other than his too few formal experiments that announced her deceptive cover, every trope dear to the decried male cinema is reversed, even if to generate a negative as caricatural as what the director wanted to denounce at the beginning.
Declining ad nauseam The metaphor of blood loss, the spectator has the impression of being (at best) taken for an idiot. While the taboo of difficult menstruations is released fortunately today, Jennifer Reeder leaves the metaphor and fails as soon as it comes to suggesting things other than by pulling its meanings to the forceps.
The character of ‘Jonny' is a caricatural preformatted condensation of the well-legitimate causes of the LGBTQIA+ movement, a benevolent acronym to which you can add all the letters of the alphabet at leisure. Product queer under the most sadly mercantile angle of the term, Perpetrator locks his characters in such gross boxes that the whole sounds radically false. Instead of choosing a more open angle on intersectionality rather than unwanted communitarianism, the monolithic psychology of the characters seems to be configured in the sole service of an outdated denunciation of yet sincere fighting, starting with that of the real victims of identity oppressions perpetrated on a daily basis.
Perpetrator flashes so much intent that he never manages to open the question of cinema to anything other than a fatality of the genre. We must see how the rare male characters (and not that they) are written with feet.
A manifest film seen and reviewed
Without wishing to bury this young committed director who here signs her fourth film, everything seems to be plucked with the elegance of the combine harvester. If the film fails to take away its spectator, it is that it seals its characters for a single political function: to show a strong woman. Without ever dealing with female characters who would not be anything other than inverted ersatz of a masculine virilist cinema, in this case exclusively based on the strength and courage of its heroes, Perpetrator sign from the beginning of the game its withdrawal. How can we reduce ourselves to such a poor vision of feminist cinema?
Pepetrator We can neither deconstruct our generated representations nor multiply the angles of subjectivity. Want to prove that women are as strong in sexism as men is the product of a terrifying binary vision where many women directors in recent years have been able to produce new plural representations, far from the archetypes and products of an era when forms are still tumbling since post cinema #MeToo.
In cinema (including genre), films such as Titanium (and so many others like Blaze, The Ravisation, Easy girl, Anatomy of a fall, Roqyaetc.) have succeeded in creating heroines on the margins, complex and tortured. More credible and sensitive figures than Perpetrator and his range of characters grimmed with morale. An obtuse angle (or even misander?) that sadly serves the queer cause, all coupled with a mediocre plot.
Ferocently feminist and queer-friendly, this series B horrific 100% girl power cunningly hijacks the tropes of the genre but vultures in the blood pools (draining more or less natural holes) that she leaves in her wake. For between situations without tail or head, schizophrenic characters and overly themes (the passage to adulthood, male predation), this adolescent drama which masturbates clumsyly thinking of the cinema of Cronenberg (the body horror) and Lynch (music) is bitten by its writing defects. Mistake this sorority?