New French Extremity

I have been making a point recently of watching films that have been identified as part of “New French Extremity” as shown in the the list in this link and others all over the internet.

Why? I find some of the filmmakers and the general idea of what these movies represent fairly inspiring. This is for the same reasons that I enjoyed Speed Racer. The filmmakers mostly seem to have committed to the direction of their films and they don’t falter in their direction.

From this list I have watched:

  1. Seul Contre Tous (Gaspar Noe)
  2. Irreversible (Gaspar Noe)
  3. Anatomie de l’Enfer (Catherine Breillat)
  4. Regarde la mer (Francois Ozon)
  5. La vie nouvelle (Phillipe Grandrieux)
  6. Choses Secretes (Jean-Claude Brisseau)
  7. Baise Moi (Coralie Trinh Thi & Virginie Despentes)
  8. A l’interieur (Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury)
  9. Mutants (David Morlet)

In general for what I’ve seen I’ve liked most of them, for different reasons and some of them not in their entirety.

I didn’t dislike Choses Secretes but I didn’t think there was much to it either. Based on this and the 45 minutes of Les Anges Exterminateurs I watched my impression of Brisseau is that he finds female masturbation provocative enough to feature it repeatedly. I have no problem with it but it’s really not that fascinating.

I had a similar reaction to La vie nouvelle, except that it is considerably more experimental. Also, I think Grandrieux has a better cinematic eye than Brisseau. Though the plot of a young man falling in love with a prostitute he just can’t have isn’t terribly compelling the way it was presented visually kept me watching, if only to figure out what the hell was going on.

Baise Moi is just kind of filled with rage and I’m not sure how I feel about it. Maybe sad. 

A l’interieur went so far in it’s gore that it went past absurdity and circled right back around to gut-wrenching. Gore doesn’t usually disturb me (in my head I’m always trying to figure out what exactly they did for the effect). A l’interieur got to me more than once and made my skin crawl. 

Mutants was a better than average zombie movie. It’s one of those zombie movies that’s not really a zombie movie but is pretty much a zombie movie (like 28 Days Later). It focused enough on the emotional experience of its characters to rise above a lot of zombie fare. 

Regarde la mer is just a very solid simple thriller that has many shots to shock. I thought Ozon’s Swimming Pool was a better movie, though I’m not sure it would fit under the “New French Extremity” heading. 

Of the list my favorites are those by Noe and Breillat’s Anatomie de l’Enfer. I know from Anatomie that I want to watch more work by Breillat and I will.

Noe is currently one of my favorite directors. We watched half (maybe less) of Seul Contre Tous in class while I was at film school and I needed to watch the rest of it, so I immediately moved it to the top of my Netflix queue when I got home, and the second half was even more interesting to me than the first.  

Irreversible is a movie I went to before going to film school (unusual, one the reasons I’m currently seeking out these films is I never really watched these sorts of films before) but my movie viewing companions and I left only a a few minutes in as Benoit Debie’s cinematography combined with the violence of the opening was causing some nausea. Finally, saw it recently. Fascinating deconstruction of the rape-revenge genre. Also, I love Benoit Debie’s cinematography (see Noe’s more recent film (which I also love) Enter the Voidm The Runaways, and it’s probably the only thing that I liked about Carriers). 

I’ve only gotten through about a third of that list (its not the only list of movies identified as being part of this trend, it’s just probably the most comprehensive). 

Anyway, as I said, I generally have found this trend interesting as it is representative of filmmakers pushing to the extremes of their stories and not faltering. Even the ones I was less impressed with had a respectable level of commitment to their direction.