SusannahThe Ordeal (Calvaire)
October 5th 2006 08:47
The Ordeal. [Calvaire]
Directed by Fabrice Du Welz.
Written by Fabrice Du Welz and Romain Protat.
The Ordeal…don’t you just love it when a title is so incredibly accurate? I mean that in the best possible way.
The Ordeal is a comedy as black as a splash of blood dried on the head of an axe. It is a slow-burning nightmare of creeping tension and delirium. As a film it is a thousand miles removed from the gooey eye-gasms and sliced ankles of Eli Roth’s Hostel and it is all the more horrifying for that.
On the surface Du Welz’s first film seems like an exercise in Survival Horror 101. But as they say (or someone of some note did, anyway) God is in the details.
Marc Stevens (played with blank-eyed impassivity by Laurent Lucas) is a low-rent lounge singer. His act prominently features a Dracula-esque cape, a hand-written sign and what can only be a Yamaha keyboard. Mostly he plays for retirement homes but the film opens with him about to head off somewhere…bright lights, big city, whatever. Even in these early scenes there is a weird tension to the film, a sense of dread strongly reminiscent of that in 13 (Tzameti). Stevens is the ultimate cold fish (or as the director would have it “an asexual Tintin”), a sort of blank slate onto which the various people he performs for project their longings and sexual obsessions.
After a troubling encounter with a nurse he’s off along a fog-shrouded road that cuts through the singularly bleak Belgium wilderness. After the inevitable engine-failure he encounters a jittery young man who claims to be searching for his lost dog. The young man – Boris – directs Stevens to a near-closed down hotel run by failed comedian M. Bartel (a desperate and emotional Jackie Berroyer). Bartel attributes his lack of success as an ‘artist’ to the loss of his wife (she ran off, possibly with another man). He sees the arrival of Stevens as a means of reclaiming his ‘enthusiasm’.
All this would sound almost heart-warming if it didn’t involve forced transvestism, homosexual rape, bestiality, crucifixion and the most extraordinarily surreal barroom sequence ever committed to celluloid. Imagine a hybrid of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Deliverance, Psycho and Hieronymus Bosch’s depictions of Hell and you’re halfway there. Along the way Du Welz even finds time to riff on Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
It’s been labelled a Horror/Comedy but for me the tag just doesn’t stick…I always think of stuff like Alligator and An American Werewolf in London when people give such a label. In those films the comedy served as respite from the more horrifying elements. In Calvaire the humour is so bleak and alienating that it actually makes the film even more disquieting. Think The League of Gentlemen (the BBC series, not the Sean Connery-starring abomination with a similar name), only darker and more demented (well…maybe).
By the time the film closes out with shots of bleak marshes and rain-shattered roads you’ll never want to see another isolated European locale, let alone hear the hellish scream of a distressed pig.
You have been warned…now go hire the damn thing.
Directed by Fabrice Du Welz.
Written by Fabrice Du Welz and Romain Protat.
The Ordeal…don’t you just love it when a title is so incredibly accurate? I mean that in the best possible way.
The Ordeal is a comedy as black as a splash of blood dried on the head of an axe. It is a slow-burning nightmare of creeping tension and delirium. As a film it is a thousand miles removed from the gooey eye-gasms and sliced ankles of Eli Roth’s Hostel and it is all the more horrifying for that.
On the surface Du Welz’s first film seems like an exercise in Survival Horror 101. But as they say (or someone of some note did, anyway) God is in the details.
Marc Stevens (played with blank-eyed impassivity by Laurent Lucas) is a low-rent lounge singer. His act prominently features a Dracula-esque cape, a hand-written sign and what can only be a Yamaha keyboard. Mostly he plays for retirement homes but the film opens with him about to head off somewhere…bright lights, big city, whatever. Even in these early scenes there is a weird tension to the film, a sense of dread strongly reminiscent of that in 13 (Tzameti). Stevens is the ultimate cold fish (or as the director would have it “an asexual Tintin”), a sort of blank slate onto which the various people he performs for project their longings and sexual obsessions.
After a troubling encounter with a nurse he’s off along a fog-shrouded road that cuts through the singularly bleak Belgium wilderness. After the inevitable engine-failure he encounters a jittery young man who claims to be searching for his lost dog. The young man – Boris – directs Stevens to a near-closed down hotel run by failed comedian M. Bartel (a desperate and emotional Jackie Berroyer). Bartel attributes his lack of success as an ‘artist’ to the loss of his wife (she ran off, possibly with another man). He sees the arrival of Stevens as a means of reclaiming his ‘enthusiasm’.
All this would sound almost heart-warming if it didn’t involve forced transvestism, homosexual rape, bestiality, crucifixion and the most extraordinarily surreal barroom sequence ever committed to celluloid. Imagine a hybrid of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Deliverance, Psycho and Hieronymus Bosch’s depictions of Hell and you’re halfway there. Along the way Du Welz even finds time to riff on Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
It’s been labelled a Horror/Comedy but for me the tag just doesn’t stick…I always think of stuff like Alligator and An American Werewolf in London when people give such a label. In those films the comedy served as respite from the more horrifying elements. In Calvaire the humour is so bleak and alienating that it actually makes the film even more disquieting. Think The League of Gentlemen (the BBC series, not the Sean Connery-starring abomination with a similar name), only darker and more demented (well…maybe).
By the time the film closes out with shots of bleak marshes and rain-shattered roads you’ll never want to see another isolated European locale, let alone hear the hellish scream of a distressed pig.
You have been warned…now go hire the damn thing.
| 73 |
| Vote |
subscribe to this blog
