La vie nouvelle

In modern day Eastern Europe life is hard and for young women prostitution is one of the only career options and one taken, reluctantly, by Melania. She attracts the attentions of an American, Seymour, who becomes obsessed with her, paying more and more money for time with her until he eventually wants to buy her outright. She has two pimps with differring emotional attachments to her and she is generally passed around like some piece of baggage with no feelings of her own. However, we are in "modern art-house cinema" territory, so conventions like narrative structure, lighting the subject so it can be seen, camera techniques that add to rather than distract from the action and a vaguely consistent plot can all be abandoned. Much of the time I had no idea what was supposed to be happening and very rarely did I care. People began leaving the screening almost before the last latecomers had arrived and I don't think I've ever seen so many people walk out.

Images are important to the director - characters slowly emerge from or disappear into a dark screen, we get long lingering shots of nothing in particular and one sex scene takes place in infra-red. In fact for such an unconventional film the sex scenes were remarkably ordinary; missionary positions between naked people in bed abounded and there were no drugs or related weirdness. But perhaps these days being ordinary is unconventional.

On the whole, almost entirely without merit.

Premiered in 2002, Philippe Grandrieux's controversial second feature film La Vie Nouvelle opens a new type of experimentation with form while at the same time challenging the viewer's tolerance. This film is not used as a means to reflect, but a device probing deeply into the desires and states of mind of the characters. Grandrieux's usual styles - shaky images, techno music, and impulsive camera position (for viewers to approximate the characters' complex and intense emotions) remain. Sex scenes are often shown in darkness and even infra-red, leading the viewer to ponder upon the suggested but unseen violence.

Contrary to the forward-looking title, the new life is a bleak one. At a brothel-like hotel in an East European city, the young American soldier Seymour (Zach Knighton) encounters and becomes obsessed with the prostitute Mélania (Anna Mouglalis). After an initiatory traumatic hair cutting scene, the human trafficker Boyan transforms Mélania into a commodity (she is carried around like a piece of weightless luggage). In this degraded urban space, men's bestiality merges with that of dogs. It is the disfigured bodies and gestures, instead of usual conversation or screams, that depicts the horror. The sensitive Seymour eventually attempts to purchase Mélania outright. Signing a pact with Mélania's infamous master, Seymour is left with a handsome price to pay.

This is a love it or hate it auteur film about control, evilness, objectified bodies, internalised fear, and extreme cinematic expression, with morally-suspect moments bound by Grandrieux's highly perceptive vision and atmospheric images.

Calling this film pretensious might be easy for someone not quite interested in the exploration Grandieux essays here. This film is more an essay than it is a conventional narrative. Praising it as boundary-breaking is also easy enough. The conflict between commercial features and artistic oriented films is there before this film and structures most of the reactions one will get from people who have watched it. This is as groundbreaking as a good narrative can be, it all depends on where your inclinations linger. But despite that, this film has some wonderfully achieved aesthetic gems. As for the plot, it's all about ambiguity and undefinition. It's about violence and lack of familiar bonds. All the exchanges between characters are troubled and not actual exchanges, power relations maybe. People are lost between sex and impotence, necessity and compulsion. Although there is no familiarity, there is an intense sexually ambiguous intimacy. It tries to suffocate you and in my opinion it is too deliberate in it, it tries to manipulate you through sound and frantic camera motion, taking it as far as to declare itself overtly ostentatious. It's excess. No problem there. I didn't find it a masterpiece. I won't say it isn't worth the look either. It's surely a quest for his own style on the part of Grandieux!

This is a film that provokes strong reactions, usually negative ones. But then that's always been the privilege of the avant-garde. Grandrieux has stripped away almost all story, dialogue, character, and motivation - except for the darkest psychosexual impulses. This film is about those impulses in the most direct possible way - it immerses us in them directly and relentlessly. Not through character and story, but directly through the audiovisual plane. He refuses to leaven or soften the experience by giving us any character we can identify with; and this is surely the point: it's a film that directly mimics the point where humans become animals, at the mercy of their basest impulses. Impossible to overcome them. This is made clear by the repeated images of wild dogs, etc. The film may both repel and bore viewers with this insistence. But there is no denying that Grandrieux is a remarkably original director in his use of image and sound. It's worth knowing that his background is in video art. The film positively swelters inside a thick womblike soundtrack of buzzing, throbbing noise; the camera sears depraved, repetitive images on our eyeballs. The film seems to exist outside time and place - some sort of east european setting is the only clue we have to whereabouts. It feels more like a circle of hell than anywhere on earth. And that's precisely the point.

This was recommended to me as adventurous cinema and knowing a previous film by the same maker I jumped at the opportunity. That film was all about the serial eye lusting for contact in the night it causes, and this is extended here in a film about a girl (a prostitute in a seedy club) and various men who lust for contact, how the lust for contact becomes spectacle that dehumanizes.

This broader lust is the delusion of mind. A conventional story does exist in some outer world we can discern (about girls stolen from some village in Kossovo and sold as prostitutes) but all that reaches us is in this state of delusion is a stream of consciousness, the hallucinative ebb and comingling of memory and desire.

It's neither pretentious as some say nor radically new; it would be the first if it was presented as we see out of some unrecognizable caprice to strut difference as insight. Instead it's tooled this way so we can experience with our eyes the participants' confusion, agony, hurt, by losing the larger world in which things acquire their proper place and swim instead in a fluid mindstream.

A long history supports it that goes all the way back to silent film, the film is a modern silent in essence, words are few, experiments in seeing are everything. Two were the most defining modes in the 20s; one was DW Griffith's that evolved from Kurosawa to Kubrick and Spielberg, destinies on a historic stage. The other was Epstein's, this is from his genealogy where life is flow, and characters are globs of color that smear and saturate the air.

There are many such impressions here that saturate outwards from inside, a devilish dance between seductor and lithe victim in a club, harrowing images of copulation near the end. But I'm reminded again that the nihilist is our saddest loss. The whole is an essay on ego, the deluded ego that clings to desire, the suffering caused by ego, the horror of the suffering; this is all in the abstract experience of what contorts space, no themes is explained to us. But you must want the way that leads out of them again.