When I was younger, it was so much easier to determine the value of a film. If the experience was pleasurable, and I left the theater happily, it was a snap. Then came the movies that were thoroughly unpleasant: bleak, appalling, emotionally wrenching. It seems to me that you can’t, in good conscience dismiss these films simply because we don’t like what they have to say. Or the effect they have on our psyche. I remember the first (and second and third) time I saw Last Tango in Paris. I guess I’m savvier now than I was at the tender age of 18 but I still hate the character, Paul. I hate the way he exploits and despises Jeanne, the ingénue who finds his worldliness exciting. When she executes him at the end, it’s all I can do to keep from cheering. To my mind, connecting with Paul is at best, like kissing someone who’s just vomited, but there’s no denying the powerful, groundbreaking experience that Bernardo Bertolucci brought to the screen. Very possibly he and Marlon Brando were the only talents capable of making it happen. Last Tango in Paris is an important film, a crucial film, if for no other reason than it set the bar so incredibly high for the filmmakers who followed.
In a way, it helps to embrace the idea that the most inspired films often turn on the director’s desire to unnerve you. To dig right in and yank at the roots of our buried shadows, nightmares, musings, reflections, fantasies : innocuous or deranged. Anyone who has studied fairy tales for very long can tell you they’re not only cautionary stories for harsh times but reifications of unspoken fear and desire. A frog becomes metaphor for male genitalia, a conversation with a wolf becomes a flirtation and a lost slipper a symbol for virginity. Such is the breeding ground for Francois Ozon’s Criminal Lovers, a cruel, strangely funny, twisted and yes, brilliant retelling of Hansel and Gretel. Though it is probably more accurate to say that the fairy tale itself is his touchstone to darker truths.
I think it’s safe to say that most creative geniuses have their own truths and bring them to bear in the art they create. That is not to say they are necessarily spot on, but for one reason or another compelling. Intriguing and valuable if not the TRUTH. There is a lot of ugly humor in Criminal Lovers, and (like the grotesque behavior often found in fabricated stories) enough extremes drawn from actual human experience to make it seem plausible. It is dazzling and beautiful and creepy and horrible and profoundly, gleefully disturbing. Ozon takes the sexual ambivalence of teenage boy, Luc (Jérémie Rénier) and bears down on it like a lump of coal until it becomes a jewel.
Now you don’t have to be Freud or Westheimer to know gender confusion is not the exception amongst teenagers. Often the rush of hormones encourages them to act out indiscriminately. Alice’s libido is the driving force behind the narrative, but Criminal Lovers is more Luc’s story than Alice’s. Though she is clearly the dominant one in their relationship. Ozon plays a lot with dominance in this film. Images of collars, leashes, entrapment, snaring and emancipation abound. At the center we find rabbits. Downy, passive, warm, guileless. They become a symbol for victimization and a totem for poor Luc, helpless in the conflicting, surging, sexual onslaught that assaults him wherever he goes.
Alice (Natacha Régnier) and Luc are in high school and ostensibly, lovers. A revelatory moment of recitation from Baudelaire catches the attention of Said (Salim Kechiouche) a beautiful, predatory Arab boy and he proceeds to seduce Alice. Alice is thrilled and repulsed by his keen interest and appetite. Perhaps she senses some misogynist undercurrent to Said’s yearnings (though probably no different than any other breeder boy) but whatever her reasons, decides he must be murdered. Of course.
She tells Luc that Said plotted her gang rape and took pictures. She invites Said to meet in the gymnasium after hours for a tryst where Luc will catch him off guard, helpless (i.e. naked) and stab him with his own knife. There is a fascinating, chilling scene (amongst many) where we watch as Luc grooms Alice for her “date.” He brushes her hair, meticulously dabs on her lipstick. When he applies her nail varnish, it is difficult to distinguish his tender fingers from hers. All the while she sits motionless, feral black eyes empty as a doll’s.
The way Alice writes about the killing afterwards is sensual and erotic. Primal. This might seem excessive if it didn’t offer an explanation (on some level) for her pathology. They shower together to wash off the blood, wrap Said’s body, and flee. In the process of burying the corpse they get lost in the woods and as time passes they get worn out and hungry. Luc finds a cabin and waits for the owner to leave so that he and Alice can sneak in and grab some food. Scarcely have they had a chance to gulp down a bite of bread when the hermit/ogre returns and takes them prisoner. They are relegated to the basement until Luc is allowed to emerge (albeit on a leash) for the sake of his company. It soon becomes clear the ogre will not be persuaded by anything Alice has to offer.
It’s not my habit to reveal so many plot details but in the case of Criminal Lovers it seems necessary. There is so much more going on in this film than I could begin to describe and one can absorb in repeated viewings. I don’t think it’s possible to watch a film by Francois Ozon (Swimming Pool; Under the Sand) and not be drawn into it. There’s a repugnant, unsettling idea lurking at the core of Criminal Lovers that becomes horribly clear at the end. Ozon dabbles with the idea of prey and predator, entrapment and complicity. Consider the bizarre sham of Red Riding Hood pretending the wolf is her grandmother.
Luc must buy his and Alice’s freedom at the cost of sexual consortium with the ogre, and we’re given to believe that only veiled extortion would have brought him out of the closet. You could make at least as strong a case for the opposite result. But this is the nightmare world of fairy tales with its compulsive, rapacious “Gretel” who associates blood jets with ejaculation, whose eyes roll in ecstasy as bullets pelt her body. In our search for the truly astonishing, it doesn’t matter that some of Ozon’s ideas are indefensible, only that his vision has integrity and personal authenticity. His genius is undeniable.