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Bertrand Bonello (France, 1968), who studied classical music before becoming a filmmaker, debuted with the domestic drama
Something Organic (1998).
Le Pornographe/ The Pornographer (2001) is not an
erotic drama but instead a drama about a terminal existential crisis and
at best a father-son relation, or, better, an analysis of a generational gap, or just the portrait of the
emotional disillusionmen of a veteran of the 1968 student riots.
The protagonist is played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, an actor that evokes the cinema of the "nouvelle vague".
Unfortunately, the idea is not fully realized and some scenes seem to have been randomly added or not edited out.
Two middle-aged couples meet for dinner and we learn that one of them,
Jacques, used to be a prolific director of pornographic films but
abandoned that line of business because it changed with the advent of
video. Because it needs money to pay debts, he has decided after many
years to return to directing.
We then see him on the set preparing to direct the new film.
He is re-married with Jeanne, his second wife, who has no complaints about their life.
The producer informs him that they need to speed up the shooting of the
film because the budget has been cut.
Jacques seems to pity the girl who plays the teenager in the film.
Jacques tells her that he has a son, Joseph, who was a toddler when Jacques
was making porn. When later Joseph found out his father's job, he left
and the two haven't spoken in years.
She says that her parents don't know about her job as a porn actress.
Jacques is clearly demotivated and distracted on the set, so the producer
takes over for an erotic scene in which two actors
(real-life pornographic actress and actor) indulge in sex, including
a very detailed masturbation with ejaculation on the face of the woman.
Then producer then tells Jacques that he is too old for this kind of work.
When he goes home, Jeanne tells him that his son Joseph called.
We then see Joseph and his two housemates in their apartment.
Jacques and Joseph meet and walk around the city. They have problems communicating and the tone is melancholic. Joseph asks if Jacques is still making porn films and Jacques tells the truth, that he had stopped but now is starting again. Jacques tries to justify himself but he sounds uncertain himself.
Joseph falls in love with a beautiful girl, Monika.
Joseph and his housemates belong to a group of rebels who disparages the old generation and despise the capitalist world that they created. In protest, they decided to stop speaking. And so his two roommates take a vow of silence.
Jacques and Joseph meet again and compare notes: Jacques was part of the protests of 1968, which were romantic, whereas his son's generation cares for more material issues, although it shares the dislike for capitalism and war.
As they walk around, they reach the point where Joseph's mother killed herself jumping from a window.
Back home, Jacques receives a phone call from a journalist, Olivia, but he pretends that she has the wrong phone number.
Jacques moves the shooting to the countryside. Joseph and his friends distribute flyers to students urgin to adopt the silent form of protest.
Monika and Joseph become lovers.
Jacques calls Jeanne from the countryside and tells her that he can't continue making porn movies.
Joseph proposes to Monika, and we don't hear the answer.
Joseph gets angry at his housemates who don't talk, only write.
He calls them "mongoloids" and they get into a physical fight.
Jacques suddenly decides to break up with Jeanne, even though they had no argument, and moves out.
His voiceover says "I'll never know why I left Jeanne."
Jacques spends some time in the country home of two friends and they, who don't have children, gift him a piece of land to build his own dream house.
Jacques starts writing a diary, and mostly it's sad meditations.
The journalist Olivia calls again. She wants to interview him for a special issue on pornography. He again declines.
Jacques looks for Joseph at his apartment but only finds his housemates who don't speak, so he writes a note for Joseph to tell him that he separated from Jeanne and is no longer a pornographer.
Realizing the form of protest adopted by the kids, Jacques reflects that he entered porn as a form of rebellion at the time when students were looking for new forms of protesting.
Jacques is pensive and abstract-minded on the set.
He has dreamed for many years to make an erotic movie in the forest,
“The Animal,” in which hunters pursue a young woman like
in a fox hunt (a Sade-esque twist on Jean Renoir's La Regle du Jeu/ The Rules of the Game).
Jacques tells Jeanne that he is
building his own house. She replies that she loves him as he is, but
he coldly replies "I don't."
His existential crisis worsens, and he writes of it in his diary.
One day Jacques follows a blonde in the streets and sneaks into her home, then simply apologizes to her and leaves.
We see him shooting "L'Animal" in the forest but it's not clear if it's
really happening or it's just in his imagination.
We don't see any sex scene, just a woman fleeing in the woods and men with dogs hunting for her.
We do see Jacques always sitting melancholy, either in his room or on
the ground where he plans his new house.
Monika tells Joseph that she's pregnant.
Finally Jacques accepts the interview and tells the journalist his life's
story, emphasizing that making pornographic films was also a political act.
When she asks him what was his favorite thing to direct, he replies
"blow jobs", which he calls "the soul of porno"
because it also involves a face, "the last bastion of humanity".
Back alone, Jacques meditates that he is looking for his son to forgive him, like a son looks for his father's forgiveness, which means that he has basically become the son of his son.
After returning to his apartment, he tries to write in his diary but can't.
He doesn't seem to have the strength to continue living.
The peak of Bonello's existential angst,
Tiresia (2003), co-written with Luca Fazzi,
updates to the age of transgender and of migrant issues the ancient Greek myth of Teiresias, the blind Theban seer who was first a man and then a woman and then again a man.
This is a myth that had fascinated French culture before, like in
Guillame Apollinaire's surrealist drama "Les Mamelles de Tiresias/ The Breasts of Tiresias" (1903, premiered in 1917) and in
Francis Poulenc's namesake opera buffa (composed in 1945, premiered in 1947).
The film transitions from psychological horror to spiritual parable.
Tiresia moves from one claustrophobic prison to the absolute darkness of blindness, where not only his movements are limited again but he doesn't even know where he is.
Staging the same actor as the psychotic collector and the dogmatic priest brings together transgender-ness and the supernatural, but also the murderous instincts hidden in both intellectual and religious endeavours, as both try to kill the outcast (he survives the collector but not the priest).
Sometimes the film gets too intellectual (like the unexplained references to Modigliani and Omar Khayam), but
John Fowles’ novel "The Collector" (1963) and George Bernanos' novel "Journal d’un Cure' de Campagne/ Diary of a Country Priest", filmed by Robert Bresson in 1951, must have been among the inspirations for some of Bonello's ideas.
The film opens with
exploding lava
and majestic music (the second movement of Beethoven's seventh symphony) and the close-up of a pensive woman. And then we hear a male voiceover in a fatalistic tone poetically meditating about a garden of roses.
An art collector, Terranova, visits a museum of Graeco-Roman statues. Then he drives to a foresty road where prostitutes line up. Cars drive by slowly in the night and smiling prostitutes display their goods.
Terranova walks among them, pensive, and eventually runs into
a young Brazilian immigrant who is singing a children's song in a melancholy tone ("Terezinha de Jesus"). This is the woman we saw at the beginning.
Terranova takes her home, lets her undress in a simple basement-like room, and then suddenly locks her up, saying that now she belongs to him.
Terranova then drives to a bar where he gets drunk.
Terranova keeps a hedgehog as a pet in the garden.
We see a close-up of Terranova's eyes watching the prisoner, who is pacing angrily in her cell and screaming nonstop.
Eventually he walks in and calmly tells her that he will not hurt her.
He ties her hands to the bed so he can sleep next to her.
He doesn't touch her. In the morning he cooks breakfast for her.
He ties her up again and sleep next to her again.
She never tries to escape.
In the morning she asks to wash herself. She undresses and turns towards him,
exposing her... penis.
She is a transgender man, a "he".
Terranova looks disappointed and almost scared rather than disgusted.
Terranova dreams that the girl is making love to both a woman and a man.
Terranova keeps feeding his hedgehog in the garden, his only activity other than
taking care of the prisoner.
Deprived of "her" daily hormones, the "girl" begins to grow a moustache and a beard.
He brings her a razor to shave.
She has been held prisoner for several days but never tries to escape.
But one day she starts screaming out of her lungs.
Terranova walks outside and we see that they are in an isolated house.
Day by day the girl becomes more "manly" because she's not taking her daily hormones. Even her voice begins to change into a manly voice.
Terranova spies "her" from the keyhole while she's washing herself, and sees
a bearded man with a woman's breast.
Then Terranova brings her man's clothes.
Terranova is silent, tormented.
The Brazilian man still doesn't try to run away.
Terranova confesses aloud that he doesn't know what to do.
If he releases the Brazilian, his brother Eduardo, a pimp, will kill him.
Terranova is torn. He kills his hedgehog with a hammer.
Terranova ties the transsexual to the bed (now dressed like a man) and then blinds him (with scissors) so the Brazilian will never be able to recognize him.
Terranova then loads the screaming Brazilian in the trunk of the car and dumps him in the woods.
A deaf girl, Anna, attends a mass officiated by priest Francois (played by the actor who played Terranova) in a small church. Anna's father Charles reads a biblical
passage about the crucifixion of Jesus.
Anna walks back home alone through the woods and finds the unconscious
razilian man (now played by an actor, not by an actress).
Anna takes him home, washes him, nurses him and feeds him like a professional nurse without uttering a word. Her father asks him his name and why he doesn't want to go to the police. The Brazilian replies that his name is Tiresia and he is an illegal immigrant. The father accepts to keep him in the house but warns Anna that, when he's out working, she'll be an 17-year-old alone with a stranger.
Tiresia, whose head is now completely shaved, doesn't explain how he got blind.
Anna, a simple country girl, who lives in an isolated farmhouse, seems happy to take care of the blind Tiresia. One day children are playing football nearby and
they kick the ball into a window of Anna's house. A child comes to rescue
the ball. Later, Tiresia is distraught and tells Anna that the child has an older brother who is in danger. The boy is indeed injured in a car accident and the family comes to tell Tiresia that they should have listened to his warning.
Later, Tiresia makes another prediction: that someone wants to hurt a factory owner.
He has received the gift of prophecy.
Tiresia still hums "Terezinha de Jesus". We see the exploding lava of the beginning.
A woman comes to ask for advice on whether to remarry after her first husband died.
Tiresia stars receiving letters from afar, people who asks for his advice, assuming that he can foresee the fugure.
Anna's father Charles, however, is not interested in knowing his future.
He thinks, however, that Tiresia has received a gift for a purpose and therefore must use it.
One day Tiresia writes to his brother Eduardo the pimp that he will never return to the old profession and they will never meet again.
When Tiresia tells a man that his depressed teenage son just killed himself, the man calls him the "devil".
Meanwhile boys are caressing and kissing Anna who doesn't rebel.
Next we see a line of people coming to bring gifts to the prophet. He is crying
in his room.
We hear Odetta Holmes singing Pete Seeger's "Poor Little Jesus" while we see
people praying to Tiresia outside the house.
The priest, Francois, is told of Tiresia's "miracles" and decides to visit him, but hiding the fact that he's a priest, dressed in regular clothes.
The encounter lasts only a few seconds but Tiresia calls him "father". The priest asks him how he figured out that he's a priest. Tiresia replies with Jesus' words: "Forgive Father because I have sinned".
Francois (who is playing by the same actor who played Terranova), who keeps a Modigliani's painting "Madame Zborowska on the Couch" (1917) in his room, takes care of a garden of roses outside the church.
Francois returns to the house to find out more about Tiresia but Tiresia claims that he doesn't remember how he became blind.
Francois tells Tiresia that he reminds him of Modigliani's madame.
The priest notices that Tiresia has not opened most of the letters that people wrote to him. The priest reads him a poem by Omar Khayam about the wisdom of blind people.
Tiresia candidly admits (like in a church confession) that he's just "a whore from Brazil" and doesn't understand profound literature. Tiresia confesses how he grew up in a favela, how he became a woman and then a whore. He tells the priest about his desperation that people don't see.
Later, Francois admits to himself that people trust Tiresia better than him, their priest. Meanwhile, Tiresia remembers about his past as a whore, living with Eduardo who provided the shots of hormones, and the encounter with Terranova.
Then we see Tiresia wandering on the paved road and then we see him lying on the asphalt in a pool of blood, hit by a car, and we see that the priest was the one driving the car.
Tiresia's last thought (a voiceover) is that Anna will be the mother of Jesus.
The priest then returns to the church and starts pruning his roses.
Anna is his assistant and plays with a child outside the church.
This cryptic ending could mean
It is not revealed whether the priest deliberately killed Tiresia or it was just a weird accident, and whether Tiresia foresaw and/or caused his own death, and it is not clear who got Anna pregnant (if that's what Tiresia's last words mean): Tiresia himself, the priest, the village boys...?
De la Guerre/ On War (2008) is about a middle-aged filmmaker (who resembles Bonello) who comically falls into a coffin and then joins a
new-age cult.
L'Apollonide - Souvenirs de la Maison Close/ House of Pleasures (2011)
doesn't have much of a plot: it's a series of tableux that
depict the daily life of prostitutes in a fin-de-siecle brothel.
Nonetheless it feels like an involuntary summary of a century of undercurrents
in multiple arts:
Edouard Manet's painting of a naked prostitute "Olympia" (1865),
Victor Hugo's novel "L'Homme qui Rit" (1869) for the scarred woman and
Arthur Schnitzler's novella "Dream Story" (1926) for the masked party,
the mistreated prostitutes of the film noir, like in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953),
the sexual perversion of the bourgeoisie, from Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour (1966) to
Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salo' or the 120 days of Sodom" (1975)
to Peter Greenaway's The Cook The Thief His Wife And Her Lover (1989),
the idealized microcosm of the brothel in films like
Hsia-Hsien Hou's Les Fleurs de Shanghai (1998) and
Louis Malle's Pretty Baby (1978), set in a New Orleans brothel of 1917,
the cacophonous split-screen technique of
John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (1966) and
John McTiernan's The Thomas Crown Affair (1968),
or, even better, of Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966), that follows the lives of girls in a New York hotel.
It is obvious that the heroines of the story have no future, but their
future is not the point of the film: the way they live while being aware of
that future is the point of the film.
Sensuality is not the center of mass of the story, but it is certainly
created by Josee Deshaies's lascivious cinematography and Anais Romand's voluptuous costumes.
The film takes place in Paris at the time of the Dreyfus affair.
Marie runs a high-class brothel.
Initially the focus is on Madeleine, nicknamed "Jewess".
She has a loyal client, Jacques, but she has
sinister premotions in the form of a dream: that he will give her an emerald,
she will ask him if it's a marriage proposal, he will not answer and instead,
wearing a white mask,
he will assault her and his sperm will travel inside her body and flow out
of her eyes in the form of tears.
The girls keep themselves clean and dress elegantly for their elegant
clientele.
Before the clients arrive,
the camera lingers on their intimate conversations.
The madame, Marie, reads a letter from an aspiring prostitute, the 15-year-old Pauline.
During the party with the clients, all the girls move their wet fingers on their glasses to produce noise.
Madeleine's man wants to tie her up and she lets him do it: he cuts her mouth
with a knife, leaving her screaming with blood all over her face.
Her premonition has come true.
Julie, nicknamed "Caca", who is Italian, is treated to a ride to the countryside by her man, Maurice.
The madame interviews the aspiring teenager and makes sure she has no scars,
is on good health, and has obtained a permit.
Pauline is assigned to Clothilde's room, who told her man that she is 28 and has been doing this for 12 years (hence she started at the same age).
Clothilde instructs her to never go out alone, to wash and perfume herself,
and how to entertain the clients.
While the girls wait for customers, they talk about the debts that turned them
into prostitutes.
At the end of the night, the girls trade reports on their night, how many men
they have to serve: four, five, six, ...
Marie writes a letter to a powerful friend: she is a
widow with two children and cannot afford the
rent increase. She may have to close the brothel and at her age there is
no other profession for her.
A prostitute is forced by her man to move around like a doll and then bend,
before the man takes her from behind.
Marie takes the girls at a picnic by the river.
The prefect replies to Marie that he cannot help her, and one of the girls
sees the letter.
Her man dumps Clothilde for the new girl, the 16-year-old, dressed in a kimono
and pretending to speak Japanese.
The girls have to undergo lengthy
gynecological
visits. The doctor finds out that
Samira was pregnant (and most likely had an abortion) and that
Julie has syphilis.
A girl cries reading a book on prostitutes that describes them as perverted criminals.
Marie has an argument with Clothilde, who is addicted to opium.
Maurice writes a letter to Julie that he cannot risk catching the disease,
and Marie tears it up so Julie will never read it.
A group of rich people hires Madeleine for a special party
at a classy restaurant, with naked girls as waitresses.
They undress the scarred Madeleine and gets excited touching her.
Meanwhile at the brothel the girls chat anxious about their future.
Julie dies and the girls dance sadly among themselves,
crying for Julie's death.
Madeleine has recurring nightmares about her incident.
On a national holiday the prostitutes and their clients wear masks.
Someone mentions the opening of the metro.
The party also celebrates the end of the brothel.
Samira's man has paid her debt and "bought" her.
The others will be sold to other brothels.
Madeleine cries sperm, just like in her old dream.
The last two minutes show a street of modern Paris, with prostitutes waiting
for customers. A car stops and
a prostitute comes out who looks like
Clothilde (played by the same actress).
Saint Laurent (2014) is a biopic of the fashion designer.
Nocturama (2016), which came out after some of France's worst terrorist attacks, is the first installment in Bonello’s "Youth Trilogy".
There is however no psychological or sociological analysis of what leads
the kids to destroy their life. The film is valuable for the
innovative structure of a crime thriller where suspense arises from simply
learning little by little what is going on.
We are so busy putting together the chaotic puzzle of the first part that
we hardly care for the motives that led these terrorists to such a silly and
suicidal action.
If there is any psychological analysis, it comes at the end, when the aspiring
terrorists are simply playing around the store, displaying that they are
fundamentally just a bunch of inept children.
The film opens with a helicopter view of Paris.
Then we see a number of young people enter and leave the subway.
They meet, split, never talk to each other.
Sophie checks in at a hotel.
A boy, Samir, picks up car keys from a motorcycle and gets into a car.
Andre', dressed formally, enters a government building.
Another one, the youngest of the group, Mika, is out delivering a box.
Two boys, David and Samir, enter a building from a back door, helped by security guard Fred, followed later by a girl, Sarah,
Bags exchange hands.
Andre', the one dressed formally, is escorted to the office of a politician who asks about his studies in political science and about his father.
One boy hides in an office.
We see two boys, Fred and Yacine, waiting for a job interview and meeting an
older adult, Greg.
We see the one who is now in the car, Samir, being warned (presumably earlier) by his sister Sabrina that their mother found something upsetting on his computer and she's out of her mind.
That young woman, Sabrina, is now cleaning a Jeanne d'Arc bronze statue in a square.
Andre' walks into a bank to make a deposit but isn't allowed in because he doesn't have any id.
Andre' meets one of the girls, Sarah, and we see that they are both students of political science. They meet in a cafe' where Yacine is a waiter.
Sarah's boyfriend David joins them.
An adult armed with a gun, Greg, rings a bell and coldly kills a man, then walks outside still holding the gun.
Andre' leaves the office of the politician and sneaks into an office to unlock the back door.
The delivery boy, Mika, walks in that floor with the box in his hands.
David and Sarah walk to two different floors of a high-rise building, where nobody seems to be working.
The delivery boy, Mika, walks into a meeting room, opens his box and leaves somthing under a window.
We see all the kids around a table discussing an explosive called "semtex".
The meeting is presided by a moustached man, Greg, the one we have seen killing a man.
we see Yacine, Sarah and Mika playing a videogame.
We see Andre', Fred and Sophie discussing the fancy hotel, and Sophie rehearsing what to say when she asks for the room.
We are beginning to understand that some of the scenes are flashbacks: the preparation for what they are about to do.
We see Sarah setting up a bomb.
The building is empty. Fred notices someone, pulls out a gun,
and kills him, but then another security guard kills him. David witnesses it.
We see Yacine and Mika throw away their phones. A second later
Mika is hit by a car.
We see Andre' leave the government building and throw away his phone.
Mika gets up and runs away without complaining to the driver who hit him.
The other kids one by one throw away their phones.
In the evening a bomb rocks the government building. Sarah checks her watch
and stares at the high-rise building of a bank.
The statue catches fire in the square.
Cars explode in a street.
Sarah is still waiting until finally a floor of the building explodes.
A shopping mall is being evacuated.
The security guards escort everybody out, turn off the lights and watch the news.
The young terrorists are hiding there in the dark and come out one by one:
Andre', David, his girlfriend Sarah, Yacine, Samir, his sister Sabrina, little Mika.
Their accomplice Omar, who works there, has made sure to disable most of the surveillance cameras.
Greg, the adult leader, is missing.
David tells the others that Fred has been killed.
Mika is injured.
Omar shows to Andre' that he has placed semtex.
They plan to hide in the shopping mall for one day.
They watch the news on the tv sets of the electronic department and see images
of their terrorist acts.
We see that Omar has killed all the security guards and in reality the surveillance cameras are all working: it's just that nobody is alive to watch.
Bored, they explore the department store and steal some of the items.
Without telling the others, David walks outside to smoke a cigarette, meets
a complete stranger, middle-aged Jean-Claude, and, guessing that he must be
homeless, invites him inside.
David walks in the deserted streets. It feels like there is a curfew.
He sees a car on fire and only meets a cyclist.
David imagines how Fred was killed.
Suddenly the homeless man and his wife show up, as David left the door open for them. This terrifies the others.
The kids spend the night chatting, eating, shoplifting, playing.
David sees on television that the cops have surrounded the building.
Andre' tells him not to tell the others.
Andre' places semtex all over the building as a way to keep the cops out.
Mika falls asleep and dreams Greg, who tells him that he committed suicide rather than compromise them after he realized that he was walking in the streets with his gun visible.
Andre' reveals that they have explosive but no detonators.
Meanwhile, the homeless and his wife steal and eat at will, clueless.
The cops start moving in.
Yacine is the first one getting killed.
Then the homeless.
The kids hear the shots and finally realize what is happening.
They hide in different places while the cops search every room.
We see in the surveillance cameras that the cops shoot them one by one.
Andre' tries to surrender but is still shot dead.
Ditto Omar.
Even little Mika is shot after raising his hands.
The cops take no chances.
Zombi Child (2019), the second part of the trilogy, is de facto a horror movie that connects a Haitian voodoo zombie and a French teenage girl.
Coma (2022) is a non-narrative collage of ideas inspired by the covid pandemic, a sort of abstract essay film.
La Bete/ The Beast (2023), a loose adaptation of
Henry James’ horror novella "The Beast in the Jungle",
is a dystopian sci-fi movie.
(Copyright © 2019 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
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