These bodily transformations are also about the metamorphosis of identity. I find the way the body reacts before the mind to things like stress really interesting. It’s the unconscious that erupts and comes to the surface. Yes, it’s about the reactions of the body, about the inside coming out. With Raw you continue to explore bodily transformation, which was the theme of your short film, Junior (2011), and the TV movie Mange (2012), whichyou co-wrote and co-directed. But beyond the female specifics, Justine’s initiation into adulthood tells a universal tale: the film’s complex examination of animal impulses and moral choices, brutal norms and individual principles, probes the primal, savage vein that runs through human nature. The misfit-girl-to-monstrous-woman transformation brings to mind Carrie and Ginger Snaps, and there are echoes too of Marina de Van’s intense relationship to her own flesh in In My Skin. It is impossible not to think of recent cannibal family story We Are What We Are, particularly Jim Mickle and Nick Damici’s version, which shifts the focus to the teenage sisters. Inevitably, Ducournau’s startling first feature will be positioned in relation to women and horror. With surgical mastery and unnerving clarity, the film dissects identity, individuality and conformity, methodically exposing the messy entanglement of their circuitry. Body parts and mangled flesh are observed in long, glacial, gruesome takes as the camera refuses to be shocked by what it is recording. Ducournau examines skin rashes, brain matter, bones, hair and blood with cold, scientific detachment. In this acutely physical film, which operates under the acknowledged influence of David Cronenberg, Justine’s transformation is shown tangibly, carnally, as moral and mental processes are inscribed on the body. Unable to conform, she will be led to discover her true nature and womanhood. Plunged in this heightened social microcosm on leaving home, the innocent, vegetarian and virginal Justine (the name is a reference to the Marquis de Sade) is confronted with coercive, arbitrary norm. In the deliberate absence of any adult control, this pack of young people sets the rules for fitting in and the boundaries of acceptably degrading behaviour. In the self-contained space of a vet school, older students subject new arrivals to cruel games, forcing them to eat raw rabbits’ livers or crawl on the floor barely clothed in the middle of the night. French medical schools are notorious for the humiliating hazing rituals that new students have to endure, and that tradition is the framework for young writer-director Julia Ducournau’s cannibalistic rites-of-passage tale.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |