Lots of cult and cultish stuff around right now: faced with the dominance of Marvel product that millions around the world would at best describe as being "all right", our filmmakers and distributors appear to have been drawn towards the margins, in search of the material that will generate what four, maybe five sheltered oddballs in the audience will persuade themselves is the single greatest work of cinema they've ever seen. With Knife+Heart, Yann Gonzalez - the ultra-cine-literate young French writer-director beloved of the Cahiers crowd - furnishes us with a polysexual period murder-mystery set in the world of gay porno that immediately recalls early Almodóvar as remade under the influence of David Lynch and Nicolas Winding Refn. If that's not cult enough for you, it also invites Vanessa Paradis to go full vamp beneath a bobbed blonde wig as a recently jilted porn director attempting to win back the ex she peeps on through a hole in the studio wall. From its opening sequence, juxtaposing frames from a skinflick - two men humping in the woods, observed by a tree-licking third party - with a kill scene in which a masked ne'er-do-well takes a dildo concealing a sharp blade to the first of La Paradis' cast and crew, the movie serves as a solicitation to the kinky and suggestible souls in the audience: you like to watch, don't you?
I did, for a bit. Most of Gonzalez's imagination has gone on recreating the kind of porn movies that might credibly have circulated within the Parisian demimonde circa 1979, paralleling what Paul Thomas Anderson was up to in the L.A. of Boogie Nights. We get a flash of Anal Fury, a fairly standard production-line job elevated by the outré scene in which an inflamed stud in police uniform begins literally banging away at a typewriter, but Gonzalez's thesis is that a combination of heartbreak and grief allows Paradis' Anne to find her authorial voice: her later reverie Homocidal - featuring men licking mirrors, and inspired to some degree by the murder investigation playing out around her - falls all too clearly in the tradition of Genet, Cocteau and Fassbinder's Querelle. Knife+Heart is at its most piquant in its juxtaposition of sex and death, lending a queer eye to the mucky business of a Hitchcock or Brian De Palma film, and in doing so revising an equation that has long been central to exploitation cinema. Sexual pleasure here doesn't automatically entail a bloody demise (though there are a few of those); Gonzalez instead floats the intriguing idea that porn (standing in for any other kind of movie, indeed any other kind of art) could equally serve as a means of processing trauma, and furthermore a means of unmasking the killer - a vehicle for expression and revelation, rather than submission and degradation. For all the teary-eyed conviction Paradis lends to her first scenes, Anne has evidently been conceived as a survivor, not the victim a more punitive creative might have made of her.
Scene-by-scene, the film has enough to catch the eye. Gonzalez arranges his jolie-laide faces and out-of-the-way places into striking tableaux: Anne's increasingly florid set-ups are interrupted by a picnicking sequence that would have done for either Renoir, and the closing credits play out over a marvellously dreamy commingling of bodies, as opposed to corpses. The problems arise when Gonzalez attempts to couple up these artfully attended frames into anything more substantial. With the layered heft of Peter Strickland's In Fabric, the season's foremost fetish-item, beyond it, we soon feel Knife+Heart leaking transgressive energy. It's a good-looking hook-up that runs out of puff. Gonzalez is still working his way up from shorts (MUBI UK is currently streaming one, 2017's eminently wacko Islands, to supplement Knife+Heart's release), and you feel as much during a midsection, pure padding, that finds Paradis roaming a forest for no especially compelling reason. We might also do well to remember that early Almodóvar was itself ragged and threadbare: only when the Spaniard began writing from life experience rather than passing fancy - around 1995's The Flower of My Secret - did he become the filmmaker who's now so revered. Gonzalez provides a few promising flickers of stimulation and titillation, certainly, but it's a rum old do - an act of perversity the cineaste may not have intended - when a porno film-within-a-film exhibits more plot, more grounding cause-and-effect, than the film itself.
Knife+Heart is now playing in selected cinemas, and streaming via MUBI UK.
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