Love of pigs and dirt in French I have never hidden the fact that I am drawn to digging up and watching sick, avant-garde, experimental, absolutely unnecessary and little-known films. Do not feed bread, but let me unearth some shit, game or just a movie seen by five disabled people. This is not because I am tempted (although I am tempted). And it’s not because I think there’s something in these movies that you can’t expect from the mainstream (although there’s a truth to that). Well, I love outsider culture (not to be confused with underground culture, which in our time is quite synonymous with the mainstream). What in literature, what in music, what in cinema. Even in comic books. She's more sincere, more courageous. More emancipated and brazen. And most importantly, little known, and therefore not sent. Sometimes you come across really uncut diamonds that you immediately want to show someone else ("Brick, for example), sometimes cause tides of unreasonable schizophrenic fun (cheap, but charming "Infection" or unscrupulous "Bad Biology"). And it happens that during the viewing the phrase “What is pornography?” will not leave your head.
Okay. The Franco-Belgian low-budget turmoil called "Torment."
Oh, first a little background, as I like. In the 2000s, French-speaking cinema discovered the ability to shoot not only cattle comedies about taxis and chamber erotic dramas (thanks, of course, to Ozone), but also very impressive and tough thrillers. Shot in a row Alexander Aja with his "Bloody Harvest", Pascal Lie with the memorable "Martyrs", Xavier Jeans with "Border". These guys staked their place in a new field of bloody and moderately burdened with meaning and sending horror films. Some went to Hollywood, some went to Canada, some got smart and made one of my favorite films, The Separator. In fact, this "wave" and went out. Crashed on the rocks after the three founding fathers ran to give inspiration to all the directors of “Hostels”. But the sacred place is not empty, so it is quite natural that the newly born genre of “French horror” is trying to revive, modify, augment other genres, border on the absurd, and even remove for 5 francs “author’s schizophrenic-sadistic thrillers about the outback” – the old classic genre of the American school of horror in the rethinking of people who talk like cats meow. "Torment" is such a thriller.
I won’t tell you the story, it’s all there is. I remember last year I read Boris Vian’s book The Heart. It was an avant-garde, crazy, pretentious, but boring and confused statement on the topic of solitude and madness on the example of a single village somewhere in the vastness of France. Considered a classic. Now, when I watched Torment, I felt like I had seen something like this somewhere. Or even read it. Minus clever thoughts, minus drama, minus at least some motives of the characters, minus meaning. Stupid modern mud-stained version of Heart. But where Vian, through the prism of absurdity and general madness, carried something, explained something and put at least some thoughts, then the heroes of the Belgian Fabrice Du Welz stupidly use pigs (in general, in Belgian cinema, the theme of love for pigs is very much traced). Remember at least the "Wedding Vase", ineptly tarantinated in total dull and meaningless dialogue, and try to understand why the operator always removes them from the same angle (answer below!).
How the crew worked, I have no idea. Okay, I imagine. A little like that.
Everyone's drinking. The actors sing songs and try to find contact with pigs. Everyone stops drinking and goes to the woods to film. A few days later, the cameraman dies of an aneurysm during filming and settles on the stedicam. Nobody notices that. Everyone's drinking and having fun. The composer went to the toilet at the beginning and did not return. Nobody notices that either. Finally, after an hour of footage, the director notices something and is animated. Says:
- Hey, my assistant, how are you? Where's our makeup? We have the first scene with a broken lip, and the dirt is not very similar to blood.
- Uh-huh.
Do we even have a makeup?
Yeah. Your niece.
- Oh, well, she's learning.
Everyone is drinking and listening.
- Louie!
- Yes, my director!
- Call your wife. Have him bring a makeup and ketchup. It will be our new makeup artist.
But my director, she is one-armed and has Alzheimer’s disease.
- So what, Louis? So what? It's a movie, Louis!
But before the filming of the last third of the film, everyone becomes ill from drinking, contact with pigs is not established, and the corpse of the operator finally began to sink. Plus, he was silent all the time and did not drink, which alerted everyone. After the funeral, the composer returned, realized that no one needed his services (and the money ran out) and went to write music for the Muppet Show. The director refused to work without alcohol. The crew has been replaced. A platoon of Panamanian mountain llamas was put behind the camera, and a makeup artist took a manipulator hand from an auto-bred factory. Pigs were replaced with calves and dogs, which were attached to spots. And it didn't seem so dull. Though ideologically and literaryly nothing has changed.
Well, that's exactly what it is. We have an author’s dirty movie without meaning and any background. Another attempt to remove the abomination and rabble of the human race by showing scenes of copulation with animals, general unreasonable madness and a hint of provocation. It didn't burn out. Not disgusting (there are truly disgusting films), not scary (this is not a horror and not even a thriller, however), not heart-wrenching (half laugh-half-paying Glavhero causes only shame for hearing and seeing this), not new (deep, nameless villagers, blahblabla...). It would help a good production, but it is not for reasons, the fantasy on which is written from above. Over a couple of scenes and the last 15 minutes, restrained praise, but alas, it doesn't change anything.