October 7
There are difficult pregnancies, and then there is Yanka's difficult pregnancy. While killer fetuses has become something of a surprisingly robust genre in recent years (for example,
Prevenge is a recent installment and quite enjoyable for those that haven't seen it), I would have to imagine that
Baby Blood was one of the first, if not the first itself. Here, we have what's at its heart a fun and gory B-movie that takes its premise and runs with it as far as it can travel. After bumming a ride on a leopard, our chatty creature finds a new home inside of Yanka, who promises to protect her as long as she's willing and able to give the creature its one source of nourishment: blood, and lots of it. Having to carry the creature to term, Yanka has to eke out a life on the run, taking up various odd jobs to support herself, all the while carrying out her sinister task.
While not high art, the film does have a firm feminist tone to it. As we meet Yanka, she's treated more as property by her employer than as a proper lover and certainly not as an equal, and it's hard not to read into the following interactions with the men of the film as being similarly charged on that front. It lends the film a darkly comedic edge to it that it may not have had otherwise, with each man wanting to sleep with Yanka and suffering greatly when her feelings and condition aren't also taken into consideration. The rapport between Yanka and her unborn entity also features a lot of funny moments, particularly as their relationship charts a course from "justifiably horrified that she's having to converse with a blood-thirsty creature living inside of her uterus" to "openly combative with one another, despite each one understanding how they need the other" to "begrudging respect for one another in the home stretch." It was an inspired decision to actually go all nine months for the story, and while there is a big skip after the halfway point to get the movie where it needs to go, the relationship still works well and gives the film an episodic feel that feels welcome.
The feminist tone is somewhat undermined in the early goings with how frequently actress Emmanuelle Escourrou runs around nude for the camera (it is a B-movie at heart, after all), but not enough to completely muddle the message. It's just that because it's a B-movie first and anything else second, it's not the kind of film one goes into looking for new and peering insight, aside from a finale that I do feel has an interesting read to it that feels like a proper culmination of what the film has been setting out to do on that front, if not exactly cathartic. I mentioned
Prevenge earlier, and I feel like that's more the kind of film that I prefer on this topic, because while it does boast the gore that enthusiasts crave, its juggling of the pitch-black humor and insight into the pregnant woman's world felt much sharper and boasts a striking level of melancholy that you wouldn't expect from a film that has an unborn baby urging the heroine to slash a few throats. The effort is certainly appreciated here, and while I think it could have stood to be pushed harder, it does nevertheless give the film a nice edge to it that makes it a better film than it would have been as a more straightforward gore-fest. If it's not a smart film, then it is definitely a clever one that satisfies one more than front.
Black comedies rarely come as inescapable as
Man Bites Dog. A mockumentary in concept, the film gets started right the hell away with its subject, the charming and smart Ben (played by co-director/co-writer Benoît Poelvoorde) begins his latest string of murders, excited that he gets to show the world what he does through his documentary crew (all played by the other co-directors/co-writers of the film, also using their names for their characters). While the violence is frequent, the film goes to great lengths to show the man behind them, as he goes about his interactions with his loving family parents, the common interests he shares with his girlfriend, and eventually, the bonding experiences he proposes to the filmmakers. It's a lot of absurdity for the subject matter, particularly considering that we're dealing with a serial killer, but it plants the seeds early on for what's to come.
This is undoubtedly a funny film by design, but one gets the sense throughout that you shouldn't be laughing quite as much given what's on display. That's when it's already too late to notice that the trap the filmmakers have set has been snared, as they subtly indoctrinate the viewer into going along with everything that follows with a smart mix of giving Ben such a strong personality (almost in spite of his raging xenophobia and racism) and rendering his murders in quick flashes than focusing too much on them at length early on, in short yet punchy montages that rendering nearly countless pistol deaths as if he was manning a machine gun and mowing down faceless adversaries. For the filmmakers in the film itself, objectivity quickly flies out the window as they're also roped into Ben's orbit of crime, first as accessories to murder and then as willing participants. Here, the murders get more protracted, but the film makes a convincing argument of once you're in for a penny, then a pound must surely follow. Even the murder of a child becomes more of a conversation about why Ben doesn't do it more often (not enough financial gain given the risks) while it's happening right on camera, with the grim punchline being that it was a mistake for Ben to target a suburban home in the first place, as the gang winds up without anything to show for it.
As one might be able to discern, this is definitely not a film for the weak of heart. While not as graphic as a lot of films can be, the frequency of the violence is enough to unsettle people, long before we get into the more elaborate crimes, including a brutal rape/murder scene that won't ever allow itself to be forgotten. One can certainly raise objections to pitching it as a comedy, infinitely black as it is, since the concept itself is so horrifying that the argument can go even further than that and make one wonder how in the world someone would even want to make a film like this at all. But like any great work of transgression, Man Bites Dog pushes things as far as it does to highlight the point of how easy it is for us to be complacent when real life horrors are presented to us and we're not directly engaging with them. And even when they're in our face, how easy it is cross the line to commit such acts ourselves when such behavior becomes normalized and even encouraged. In that sense, it was a very canny move on the part of the filmmakers to cast themselves in these roles, as it shows that they're not projecting any kind of moral superiority towards the stance that they're taking here. That may well be the film's boldest move, as it ensures that no one can escape the film's pull and come out clean through the other end: if they're going to be part of the problem, so will you.
This is the sort of film that made me feel a lot of things that I don't normally feel: guilt, outrage, disgust. But it also made me think about why I felt those things, why this film was able to draw those feelings out as well as it did, and how it was able to do that without feeling like empty provocation. It's easy for a filmmaker to kill a child on screen, but
Man Bites Dog puts such an unusual spin on it with how it chooses to do so that how it's done here is far more chilling than anything more graphic could ever produce. This is the kind of brilliant filmmaking that you seldom see produced, as it is so easy for filmmakers to go down the road of being more interested in how violence looks rather than how violence feels, and here, with such a sharp insight on the difficult relationship that anyone and everyone on the planet has with violence, it takes on a resonance that few films could ever hope to match. This is the rare feel-bad film that actually feels really good as it demands a conversation and for you to respond to it. It's a tough nut to crack, and I'll even admit that I'm likely only scratching the surface, but I can already tell that this is going to provide lots of worthwhile thoughts within myself for a long time to come. If that isn't a masterpiece, I don't know what is.
Films for Oct 8: It's time for an Italian trilogy! Sort of! First up is a meta-commentary from the most unlikely source, Lucio Fulci, as he points the camera at himself for a change in
Cat in the Brain. Next up, for what was originally intended to be a comeback vehicle for Fulci before his death, we travel to early 1900s Paris and Rome for a little slice of Gothic horror as inspired by the likes of Hammer in
The Wax Mask. Finally, we travel a bit further back in time further still for
Arcane Sorcerer, concerning an excommunicated priest whose new career path strays very far indeed from the path of God.
