After Promising Young Woman, the director Emerald Fennell was expected at the turn for his second film, Saltburn. Unconvincing, it must be noted that the director's second feature film had at least the ability to afloat the canvas for its so-called "trash" side. Short review of this film, before making a longer detour on ten real trash movies to whom Saltburn usurp the qualitative...
Contents
The story of the film is simple: Oliver (Barry Keoghan) found himself trained in the decadent aristocrat world of Saltburn by his comrade – and incidentally also his big crush – Felix (Jacob Elordi). Within this bourgeoisie, which has been left behind by a lavish party, unbridled sex and oversized buildings, Oliver seems at first to be lost. He will soon be comfortable there.
If there is nothing to say about the interpretation of the two main actors absolutely perfect (Keoghan finds there a troubled role, in some way close to what he delivered in the genius The Death of the Sacred Cerf), the film is perclusive of defects. As a victim of the persistent syndrome of the second film, Fennell makes too much of it and delivers us an ampoule feature, in which the exuberant setting, constantly swollen, struggles to converse with the background of the feature film. Subversive falsehood, we only retain a few beautiful, tape-to-eye images rather than a real point, while Saltburn do not hide from lurking on the side of Theorem or Salò Reference level...
But if the film is medium, it has, on the other hand, set in motion an impressive word-of-mouth on the canvas, frightening social networks and the press with good words on its so-called "sulphur and trash" side... Two perfectly usurped qualifiers in case of Saltburn, and as it is appropriate to put the cinema in the center of the village we have concocted you a small list of films Really. Trash! If Saltburn You shocked yourself, so tie your belts, it might shake a little...
A real girl
Alice (Charlotte Alexandra) leaves his bahut paradoxically synonymous with freedom to return home to spend his summer vacation. An endless torpor of the overwhelming summer days, enclosed in the carcan of a couple of oppressive brooders, Alice dreams of beaches that adorn the postcards of her friends. Yet, shaken by the seismic waves that a repressed desire makes vrumbling in her guts, she goes on her bike criss-crossing the countryside letting herself be drunk by the looks men wear on her body. Fantasies that all catalyze on one guy, Jim, employed by Alice's father in the local sawmill.
Sometimes you have to go back to the etymology of a first name to explore its own meaning. Alice would come from a German root, Adalhaid (thank you wikipedia). By dissipating this word, we obtain two modules that articulate its meaning: the adal element- for « noble » and hat- for « Land » or heit « kind, appearance ». Noble, mooring, appearance, three perfect qualifiers to characterize this Alice from the petty bourgeoisie (her father runs a business and seems to put little hands in the camboois), the girl will wander throughout the whole film in the moors surrounding her parents' house and finally, everything rests on her appearance, she who appreciates so much feeling the desire of others in front of a sensually bare body during most of the film.
A characterization that could be that of a heroine coming-of-age a little vanilla, rather harmless. That's where you go Catherine Breillat in dance, she who here makes her first film following a producer's proposal to adapt her own book The Sigh. Crossing pornographic scenes, the film will celebrate its last day of shooting in 1975 but it is only in 1999 that it benefits from a real release: A True Young Girl Indeed, it will suffer from the censorship and bankruptcy of its producer.
Catherine Breillat proposes here a bancal object, anchored in his time, but o how exciting by what he delivers as by the probe he offers in the career of his director. Indeed, the one who has made more than fifteen films, who will have staged for no other than Pialat or Fellini, places this first film in perfect mirror position with its latest one, Last summer. A filmography construction in which the seminal image is the negative of the last, which it is necessary to analyze as the fact passionately Erwan Desbois on Accred. Yet, A True Young Girl remains in itself a rich object to search, and that it is interesting to affix against Saltburn to bring out the kindness of his provocation. If we also find ourselves in a critical bourgeois milieu, and desire places its panoptic look at the center of the film, no doubt that Breillat relegates with his very first feature film Saltburn Sandbox...
Freedom
If Pacification was able to project his director in front of a critical unanimity, the Catalan facet was not at his trial. Indeed, after eight films and even more shorts, Serra had long proved the audacity of his cinema. Better, he had the nerve to attack movies in costumes each time, where most directors usually reserve this extremely expensive cinema at a time of their career when financiers allow it (i.e. usually late). At the thematic level, nothing less flamboyant. Serra attacked the Magi Kings in The Song of Birds, the figures of Casanova and Dracula in History of my Death, to Louis XIV in The Death of Louis XIV... Anyway, the gentleman isn't really used to anecdotal.
Then, between these films and Pacification, he released a soberly titled film Freedom, inviting us to a libido and night trip. Again we pour in the film in costumes, since we will follow there three libertins – Madame de Dumeval, the Duke of Tesis and the Duke of Wand – driven from the pudibond court of Louis XVI. They will then seek the support of the Duke of Walchen, a German free thinker, and intend to import their libertinage (and their freedom) into that country, which then means permissiveness.
This is history, the short lines of escape from a scenario that Serra will amuse (as always) to let escape between her fingers. The cinema of the Catalan dandy will be a-narrative or not. Thus Freedom opens onto a rusty forest, soon torn by a cry, sublimated by both artificial and captivating lighting. Soon, a carrier chair appears in the plan. Its regularity contrasts with the dense grouse of the forest. A little further on, one can guess the silhouette of a man. A wig. A court suit. The schism between these dim silhouettes and the hardiness of the forest informs us about the erratic nature of their escape. Are they lost? What is the threat to them?
Mix of night and light, natural and artificial, raw sexuality and kept verbiage, Freedom Go constantly masked. If aesthetics is everywhere, unlike Fennell in SaltburnSerra constantly converses the background of his intrigue (the libertin impulses of his uprooted bourgeoisie) with the image he unfolds before our eyes. A travel film that covers you and chokes you, spitting out of his lukewarm night as if you were just a lucky intruder-voyeur for having been able to look at this part of life soon stolen.
Canine
If he's about to deliver his Poor creatures which already makes great noise before even being released, Yorgos Lanthimos used us to the crash movie with Canine released in 2009. History is simple: overprotective parents keep their three teenagers under control to protect them from a so-called dangerous outside world and organize their detention by truncated their vocabulary and playing on their perceptions of normality.
With the coldness of a Haneke, Lanthimos unfolds in his cruel fable the same notion of confinement as in Saltburn but with a diametrically opposite aesthetic enterprise. Where Fennell is abusing the music clip's ambiance and tape-in-the-eye effects, Lanthimos condenses all of his staging to meaning. The film becomes rêche, unkind, cold, which can only increase its strike force in moments of explosion of violence. Better, where Saltburn try to reverse the situation of a clever little, Canine content to constantly densify the possible reading grids of its own story without ever falling into the explanation or easy twist. The work thus becomes more and more interesting as it progresses and matures in its spectator, while in reverse Saltburn dries while viewing until forgotten before even being finished...
An inflatable doll in the desert
Overall, there is little relationship between Saltburn and An inflatable doll in the desert... And yet! The first one constantly loses in complexity by locking in the codes of his own genre, conversely the Japanese film that one could categorize as a pinku eiga n
But history is simple: Sho, a detective, is hired to track down a group of Yakuzas, responsible for the kidnapping of a young woman. Sho will take advantage of it to avenge his girlfriend's death, kill by the same Yakuzas a few years earlier. Yet from this rather linear material, the director Atsushi Yamatoya will constantly (and artificially) complex his story using a very Burroughsian cut-up, enchasing past, present and dream scenes. A surprising film emerges, decondensing, disconcerting by its sex and violence, but certainly in front of the standards of its time (1967) and traversed by ridiculous poetic impulses.
Salò or the 120 days of Sodom
Pléonasme que devoquer le Salò or the 1 20 days of Sodom And yet... With each plan, Saltburn Would like to refer to the maestro Pier Paolo Pasolini, both for his trash masterpiece released in 1976 and for his previous film, Theorem. Unfortunately, as we have already mentioned, Saltburn no-one has stopped deploying his catalogue of sleeve effects that never manage to dialogue with a stronger background. Hard to claim a place alongside Salò With a film empty of substance...
Commonalities with Saltburn Yet there are: nobles, decadent, who lock in their palace people of the "people", here is enough to draw a parallel that stops there. Indeed, by borrowing from the literary work of Sade while keeping a filiation with Dante's hell, Pasolini goes from painting to painting to paint a very black portrait of the filthy residues of his fascist Italy. And during this descent into hell, one can read in the subtext a sharp critique of bourgeois society then, where sex is used to symbolize the enslavement of a part of the population subjected to ever more powerful fascistic capitalism.
A desperate and hopeless film, but also a staging maestria, Salò testifies, after many films highlighting the exaltation of sexuality (The Decameron, Canterbury Tales and The Thousand and One Nights) a fall in pessimism for the Italian director and poet. A film whose editing he cannot even finish until he is coldly murdered in November 1975, in circumstances still troubled today.
Loyalty
In the Territory of ecstasy of Ludovic Cortade, the author quotes Bruno Dumont which said in substance in Humanity : « Sex is the only way to make a body, to copulate again and again until it dies. This is the tragic path of fusion, of desire to the inaccessible UN that our fragmented, exiled human bodies are trying to recover.». And filming Freddy and her compulsive sex with her girlfriend, who will never stop moving away from him until she sleeps with her greatest rival in The Life of Jesus. Or the rape suffered in Twentynine palms (which we will discuss below) by these unknown menaces, in an attempt (in the end successful) to conquer the photographer and main character, to dispossess him from himself.
In Loyalty Also, sex serves as a trigger. Niguina Hafiznova Saifoullaeva, his Russian director, places the spectator from Lena's point of view. This young woman, married to Sergei, suffers from the hollow of their relationship. Her husband doesn't look at her anymore, don't touch her. The brief attempts to stir up became unsuccessful. Until the evening when, furtively, she saw a message from a young woman on her husband's cell phone, harassed by notifications. From then on, the gear starts. The doubt arises. Incarnates in these incessant vibrations of a phone that she has access to but that she dares look at. Lena is convinced to be deceived. And decided to cheat in turn.
Every relationship she starts is about dispossessing her husband from her own body. Cuckold, she's on his turn. She undergoes these unknown assaults, caught in bars, to better appreciate her revenge. Their quick come-and-go from which she derives no pleasure except that of the suffering of the other. Until this man, whom she will invite to a provocative skirt lift, to join her on the beach. Stuck (hidden?) between metal parpaings, incubated by the moon, their ephemeral mating seems to please him. For the first time, she moaned. Get active. The cold mechanics of revenge finally seems to turn to a mechanism of pleasure... But their coitus is interrupted by two police officers.
And Lena could never enjoy her own deceptions. A few days later, during a discussion with Sergei, her husband, she learned the source of her constant messages: a colleague wrote to her. The message she had interpreted as coming from her man's lover was nothing but a replica of the play that this woman played with Sergei.
"We think he's a man we have in front of us, but it's actually no longer a man, it's been a long time since he's been a man. It's like a black hole, and you'll see, it's gonna blow us in the face. People don't know what madness is. It's terrible. This is the most terrible thing in the world." This quotation by Emmanuel Carrère could frame the whole story of Loyalty, be affixed as a final apostrophe or on the contrary appear as a notice of opening. What other person, with whom one shares one's life? What is the other one, with whom we are united by this strange ring that Niguina Hafiznova Saïfoullaeva will have stopped filming? Because this is what obsessed Carrère, and here the director of Loyalty : the otherness of the couple... And tense like a mirror at the night copulation scene, claustrophobic, locked up, Lena will find her husband on the beach for a reconciliation scene. The plan is wide. The sun lights everything. The horizon is open. The story is over, on a good note. Really?
Stay a handful of plans, by car. Her husband asks her about sex with this stranger. Turns on imagining with another. Lena is poking. Close. "It's dangerous to talk about it," she said. Dangerous. For the first time in a rather naturalist feature film, the plan is detached from its characters. The camera recedes, rises up, sees from above the loops of a motorway exchanger. Circularity? The inevitable return? Or the crossover of a couple's path? Interpretations are open.
And this question of otherness, of inevitable ignorance of what happens in the circumvolutions of the other's brain, ends to connect Loyalty to the film we are doing today, Saltburn. While the Russian director's film remains clearly in the soft part of the selection, she deploys in her film a much denser mesh of reflection than Fennell does in her feature film which ends to legitimize her presence here.
The Sadness
To be applied following Hong Kong Category III, The Sadness of the Rob Jabbaz finds its place in this ranking, to go back to the crash bar after a previous film categorized as "soft". Indeed, here all the sliders will be pushed deep within a bloody and shocking fable that seems to have no limit.
The story of the film begins as any long film of contagion... A quiet life suddenly shaken by a strange virus, which seems to turn its victims into totally disinhibited executioners, eager for sex and violence. Following a burst of hemoglobin and unbearable acts, in a wet, sweaty atmosphere...
The film will only have little connection with Saltburn, but proves if it was necessary to affix the term "trash" to Fennell's film results from pure and hard deception. Note that The Sadness It would have been just as good to have given way to feature films at least as unbridled as the recent one. Wolf Hunting Project or oldest Ebola Syndrome, all three are (or will soon be) available on Shadowz Hey! But The Sadness is also available in physical format. the test is to be read here…
Twentynine Palms
A couple. David, Katia. The first one is a photographer, the second one accompanies in his tracings in the deserts around Los Angeles. A simple beginning for this film by Bruno Dumont taking scene at the end of the US...
« There is nothing better to prepare the movement than the immobility ». This is what Dumont replied seven years after the realization of Twentynine Palms on a question about the pictorial nature of his cinema. Immobility as a preparation for action. The contemplative, a constancy in Twentynine Palms. A constancy, a rhythm, a regularity that Dumont will follow until the conclusion, also still. The same consistency, the same regularity that David imposes with this red Scotch ribbon attached to his steering wheel to keep the course. Drive straight.
When he gives up his place, when this constancy is tainted, trouble begins. The clutches scratch the body, turn a finger to kill a dog or bring the couple to the threatening mouth of this abandoned house, where one awaits the appearance of Leatherface or a cannibal of the Wes Craven of The Hill has eyes. Yet it is precisely these ambardments, those moments when the red ribbon no longer indicates the heading, where the humanity of David sweats the most. Fear for their skin. Guilt to the canided shot by his Hummer. Anger to see the painting of his scratched device. The rest of the time, when he is on his tracks, David is a robotic primate. Mutic, vaulted physical posture, conflicts undoubtedly passing through violence or brutal sex.
Conversely, Katia. Just as mutic, she just suffers. Until too full that sometimes bursts, when one expects the least. Tears, screams, hysteria. If Bruno Dumont shows us the most beautiful facets of this couple – probably with one of the most solar scenes of the film – in this escape through the rocks up to this image in cross-dive of this nude duo, as white as the stone that supports them, he does not hide the cracks. Fractures that, from the beginning, make us feel the end.
But if one could believe throughout the film that the horror promised by the film label would come from inside, it is on the other side of the window, on the other side of the door of their room, on the other side of the gate of their pool that it stands. For if David likes to watch this harmless television that they do not understand (« Arguably a movie of art », he says), is to make us better understand that the predator is not there. Twentynine palmsIt's not just an art movie. Not just plastic. Photography. Painting. The plans leave the possibility of « meditate on an image », but gradually the streets simmer, the landscapes that were thought empty fill with a threatening engine, even the dark windows of the cars hide the antagonistic, this evil screwed to deep America, this twisted, viciated being who, for no reason, wants you evil.
Fear of the stranger, fear of the unknown, fear of the new. Tricked looks of cars crossing the couple, threatening pick-ups, rude waitress, the two strangers are not welcome. Dialogue never starts. And even within this couple, the discussion skates between French, English, Russian. It follows tire runs, threatening cars to the Duel, until the final act, the catharsis of history, where the roles have returned. David becomes the penetrate, pathetic, crying, dripping, and it is no longer he who enjoys screaming, like a strange beast, but indeed his assailant who will disappear immediately. Still without dialogue, always without reason.
If the field of the horrific genre is obviously addressed, it is in a destructured, thoughtful way, in offset. Like a David Lynch with the deaf terror that was born at the beginning of Lost Highway and will only swell afterwards, or Twin Peaks which behind the postcard image hides a less relishing varnish.
The final follows the logic of the feature film. David, macho, superior, will not be able to endure the humiliation of which he was the victim before the eyes of his companion. A penultimate scene that convenes Psychosis, and that's settled. The outbreak of violence, the one that appeared in their debates, in their disputes, can finally burst. Their bow is over. Just this Hummer, empty. A naked body, soon dry, swallowed by the sand. That police inspector who gets lost in the desert. And the frame, immutable, pictorial, giving us time to meditate on the image before the final clap.
Counterpoint to Saltburn and at its flood of images, plans that want to fly, constant oversaturation of the spectator's senses. And proof, if necessary, that the Dumont method is much more effective in scoring the audience than Fennell's...
Blood oranges
If at the time of the creation of this brief catalog of trash films there appears clearly a vein tinted with drama (apart from The Sadness, all the films are rather on the side of this register), it should not be forgotten that laughter too can sting with the crash. Notably the yellow laughter, the one that the theatre collective "The Dogs of Navarre" masters best and that he comes with Blood oranges sleeping in the cinema under the direction of Jean-Christophe Meurisse.
By unfolding three stories knit together (that of a furious pleonastic minister, of a couple of old moneyless and of a teenager who fears his first sexual experience) with in common a refusal of taboos and a assumed raw aspect, Blood oranges use of the crash as an outlet in the face of constant and growing social injustices, incubated by a largely incapable political class and oozing from barely veiled cynicism. Resounding painfully with French political news, Blood oranges is a cruel parenthesis, which is as entertaining as it is disturbing, which passes to sulfate nihilisitis the entire political class under the aegis of a illuminating quote from Antonio Gramsci: "The old world dies, the new world tarries to appear and in this clear-obscured rise monsters". A film far from the clichés of the French comedy mainstream, which finds its place in this short list of irresolutely trash films.
A film much more interesting than the inconsequential Saltburn by what he tells of French society, ploughing the field of politics deep. A collective to find at The work in theatre, with their play Life is a party…
Visitor Q
Could not make a list on the crash movies without mentioning at least one film of Takashi Miike, in this case Visitor Q he shot in less than a week using a digital camera. Through several provocative questions on the screen – "Have you ever slept with your father?", "Have you ever beaten your mother?", ... – Miike chapter his feature film by returning all the common places: harmony of Japanese houses becomes a dirty and delabrated setting, the roles of parents are constantly subverted, the relationship between executioner and victim turned... And in this movie ass overhead, we will mock the weight of habits that will settle the increasingly perverse behaviors of the various protagonists.
Insolent and agitating, Miike does not break all the moral rules for the mere beauty of the gesture (unlike many other Trash films), but shakes the ill-placed Puritanism of a Japanese society at the start of a new millennium (the film comes out in 2001 and is resolutely marked by dated aesthetics). Criticism of the media but also meta discourse of its own condition (the characters regularly display themselves filming the images that will be seen in the feature film), Visitor Q interrogation using as much purely horrific imaging as rather confusing comic and great-guignolesque stalls.
UFO film certainly less seen thanHearingHe delivers a strange vision of the family through his dirty DV images. If critics refer to the film as a vector of a conservative discourse, it is rather a virulent charge against a sick society, gangrenate from within, than a plea for a traditional nuclear family. It should be noted that the feature film is clearly on the side of the Theorem of Pasolini, just like a certain Saltburn. We will let you choose your favorite sulphide feature film...
Conclusion
Small round of cinema more or less crash, through directors using their shock images to dialogue with the background of the film. Something that painfully misses Saltburn, which would be provocative but which is only a slow thriller quite flat in what it has to offer us. Not less thanEmerald Fennell, although having succumbed to the destructive syndrome of the second film, nevertheless proves that she has something in her eye: a director who does not lay her best film here, but who will certainly have to follow in the future !
Subscribe
Connection
0 Remarks
oldest
