Flame in the Night: Transgressive French Cinema
ICA London

FILM director Jean-Luc Godard famously once remarked that all you need to make a film is a girl and a gun.

Sixty years after the “new wave” in French cinema, of which he was a leading light, this short season of modern French rule-breakers extends Godard’s adage to include a katana sword, a gender-bending fruit — and a dildo with a concealed switchblade.

For the large part, the film-makers — Bertrand Mandico (The Wild Boys), Yann Gonzalez (Knife + Heart) and co-directors Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel (Jessica Forever) — express the transgressiveness of the season’s title in their films by relying on eroticised violence and predictable genre subversions to get the audience talking.

In Knife + Heart, Vanessa Paradis plays a porn director whose friends and associates are continually killed by a leather-faced, lethal sex-toy wielding killer. The film loses itself in its attempts to be mystical and profound, mistakes low-budget slasher-flick progenitors avoid by design.

Like recent releases such as Mandy, In Fabric and last year’s Suspiria remake, Knife + Heart draws inspiration from the clothing fashions and ambiance of the 1980s in lieu of having an original story to tell.

The Wild Boys, the most successful film in the season, follows a group of privileged young men at the beginning of the last century who, after sexually assaulting their teacher, are imprisoned on a boat with a grizzled sea-captain.

With a treasure map in his britches, he takes them on a voyage to an island full of magical fruit. The Wild Boys’ more indulgent moments — lengthy nude dance scenes set to electronic music and an over-reliance on period detail and bodily fluids — only partially conceal the well-paced story at its core and its capacity to surprise.

One is left with the feeling director Mandico struck lucky and will never make a film of this quality again.

Showing the most promise but failing to deliver, Vinel and Poggi’s Jessica Forever and After School Knife Fight are the most disappointing films in the season. Beautifully shot but vapid, they fail to transcend the sense that they are mere exercises in composition and lighting.

Declining to build on the emotional power and sharp storytelling of the directors’ earlier short films, the beauty of the images and actors clash with the stories of outcasts they attempt to tell. Their raw style feels about as authentic as pre-ripped jeans.

It’s the unfair fate of every generation of French film-makers since the 1960s to be compared negatively to the new wave.

But the antithetical reliance on production design and concept over storytelling and characterisation in this season can’t help but leave the viewer reminded of the importance of the latter qualities — and how dull cinema can be without them.

If there is a positive aspect, it’s the sense that this can’t be sharpest cutting-edge contemporary French cinema has to offer and that something better has to be around the corner.