Benedetta has arrived! Going into Cannes, Paul Verhoeven's promised delirium of Baroque nunsploitation was one of the most anticipated titles in competition. As the mixed reactions pour out of the Croisette, international expectations have only increased; Unanimous praise would be disappointing for such a film. Beyond Verhoeven in the Competition lineup, Catherine Corsini also premiered her latest La Fracture. Other promising new titles outside the competition slate are Eva Husson's Mothering Sunday and Karim Aïnouz's Mariner of the Mountains. As we wait for those four gourmet prospects to be released or come to a future festival near us, we look back at these directors' past works, to find many visions of carnality, both sensual and disturbing...
ELLE (2016)
When the pleasure of entertainment feels like a blade painlessly pushed into your body, you know you're watching a Paul Verhoeven film. The greatest trick that devilish Dutch provocateur ever pulled was figuring out how insidious fun can be. While portraying ghoulish realities with unabashed crassness, he forces the audience to question their enjoyment, confront the origins of personal reaction and the hypocrisies lying therein. Exploitation is the mask his cinema wears to hide its viciousness.
Not nearly as pornographic as some of the director's earlier features, Elle is still a nuclear bomb of bad taste fueled by a willful dive into the depths of unhinged sexual behavior. In a crazed killer's adult daughter, raped by an unknown assailant and then driven to self-annihilating erotic revenge, Isabelle Huppert found the role of a lifetime. It's not that Elle represents the French thespian at her best, but that nobody else could play this character. Indeed, take Huppert out of the equation, and the whole thing falls apart, no matter how winsome Verhoeven's direction or how intelligent David Birke's script ends up being.
Through this goddess' mysterious genius, Elle succeeds as a pitch-black comedy about rape. But, better yet, it transcends that premise, unexpectedly turning into one of the best portrayals of how unnervingly weird humans can be when dealing with trauma. Sleazy to its core, it can make one laugh at the most wicked things imaginable. What's more, in the same beat, the film's equally capable of challenging our views on the culture we live in, its expectations of survivors, its understanding of violence. Elle is fearless!
Available to rent from most services, including Amazon Prime Video and Youtube.
SUMMERTIME (2015)
Love stories that are simply about love sometimes err on the side of sentimentality, losing character and precious specificity along the way. Catherine Corsini's Summertime, also known as La Belle Saison, avoids this fate by following one ingenious strategy. While this drama is indeed a romance, its focus is on the long-lasting effects of a love affair rather than inchoate emotion. It's about how the relationship between two women in 1970s Paris became the conduit of their liberation, self-knowledge, and political awareness. Despite the bucolic title and general air of sunny naturalism, Summertime's a surprisingly cerebral take on the romantic picture.
Izïa Higelin plays Delphine, a young woman moving from the country to Paris. Such a big move eventually leads to her crossing paths with Cécile De France's Carole, an older feminist activist whose casual command of the camera's devotion is awe-inspiring. While Delphine's arc shapes the movie, Corsini is a generously able to equally explore Carole's self-discovery in and out of her romantic union with the other woman. Its purview of her activism is especially lovely, depicting the messiness of collective action without foregoing a depiction of its inspirational quality. Throughout it all, stolen moments of intimacy vary the pace, add a note of sensuality, a hint of euphoria. It's the contact of warm skin, the smiles shared in a pastoral rendezvous, a stolen kiss.
Streaming on Kanopy. You can also rent it from many services.
BANG GANG (A MODERN LOVE STORY) (2015)
Films about teenage sexuality have a sad tendency to become moralistic screeds. Even something as putatively libertine as the collected works of Larry Clark and Harmony Korine drip with contempt for the subjects, exploiting them for shock value. Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story) avoids this fate, further side-stepping a blanket endorsement of every single behavior it depicts. It's sex positive and sexy, but not exploitative. Eva Husson shows great assuredness behind the camera, even though this is her feature debut, acknowledging her young characters at their level while also refracting how we perceive them through a prism of formalistic grandeur.
A well-choreographed camera movement can be as titillating as an orgy and just as important as a character beat. While the scripted narrative feels a bit anemic at times, the overall effect is beguiling.The execution's rigor also keeps us at a distance, striking the tricky balance between sensory overload and studious alienation. It's immersive, but not so much that we lose ourselves in its brand of apathy-induced hedonism. Glancing into the abyss, the flick never plunges. It dares us to but also pulls us back. The entire thing feels like a contradiction in terms, and yet, in Husson's talented hands, the paradox makes sense.
Streaming on Roku, Vudu, Tubi, Kanopy, and Pluto TV. You can also rent it from many services.
FUTURO BEACH (2014)
Bookended by motorcycle rides into unknown destinies, Karim Aïnouz's Futuro Beach is as much a travelogue as anything else. Though the main character goes through geographical displacement, from Brazil to Germany, the voyage that gives the film its shape is one of introspection, a search for the self, for control, for life on the edge. Starting in abstraction and slowly hinting at more concrete realities, Futuro Beach comfortably sits on the perimeter of narrative, always insisting on remaining elusive, abstract, a mood piece that, from a certain angle, looks like a character study. Or is it a queer romance? Perchance a testament to brotherly bonds? A poem about masculine physicality?
Chapters and acts bleed into each other. Themes do, too. Only the visceral allure of our most secret wants is constant and sure. The film thus unravels in perpetual oscillation, between euphoria and yearning, sex and solitude, uncomplicated joy, and the stubborn feeling that something's missing. Aïnouz has made better films, but Futuro Beach is exemplary of the director at its most sensual. He directs like a mad artist playing with motion, shade, and color – red splotches against the sea, sweaty flesh colliding in combative dance, tenderness that feels tough, violence that looks soft. It's intoxicating.
Available to rent from many services, including Amazon and Youtube.
In this quartet of cinematic desire, do you prefer? I think Elle gets my vote, if nothing else, because of Huppert's astonishing work.