La vie nouvelle

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.

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!

La Vie nouvelle is a succession of great images. In terms of beauty, Grandrieux hit's the spot. If you have seen and liked Tarkovski, you can clearly appreciate the time taken here to create a mood, to create beautiful images. La Vie nouvelle doesn't need any plot, I think most of the ideas are explicitly shown in the film. This film doesn't need any "wow-factor" either, the bangs and explosions come from the inside, while watching the movie. We could go as far as saying that Grandrieux's film is a poetry of moving pictures. People that say that this film is rubbish, or has "nothing to offer" should reconsider watching this movie again.

If La Vie nouvelle is rubbish and has nothing to offer then maybe you could tell the same thing about Marco Ferriri's "La Grande Bouffe" ...or even of Royston Tan's "Shiwu". The thing relating those two films to La Vie nouvelle is the fact that all those movies show us reality, as it is.

I saw this film for the first time today in critique class and i'll be going in tomorrow's other group class to see it again. Cinema isn't dead, this movie just proves it

Film is a must-see for every art-movie and experimental film cinematography fan; 'moralistic' approach in trying to understand the concepts behind the film with rigorous logic and one-dimensional thinking will at the end fail unmistakeably; it's a direct experience of the subconsciouss or better unconsciouss material, surging up, as a sort of psychological 'nightmare', unfolding the raw material of vital impulses mixed with vague and seemingly blinded forces of almost formless reality which takes shape slowly into the visual and dark 'narrative' of threshold consciousness, pulling your senses in and out and bringing you face to face with your suppressed hidden reality, opening the dimension of the "concept of evil" in a strange way, somehow mirroring itself through the metonymical unfoldment of self-persistent desire to appropriate, to devour, to feed on the Other with the central point of the spectator and his gaze...to quote the excerpt from the "Evil and the Senses / Philippe Grandrieux's Sombre and La Vie nouvelle" by Martine Beugnet: Engaging with the legacy of the French surrealist and impressionist avant-gardes, Grandrieux thus equates a return to cinema's first vocation - the evocation of that which lies at the margins of human consciousness - with the rediscovery of the cinematic image as visual and sound textures - a form of sculpting in movement. Accordingly, although a battery of techniques rendered possible by twenty-first-century technology is deployed, the manipulations are not put at the service of transparent or illusionist effects. On the contrary, realistic aesthetics, psychological elaboration, and narrative logic are abandoned in favour of a celebration of cinema as a visceral, synaesthetic experience, where movement, images and sounds operate as affects that precede the emergence of rational discourse.

Grandrieux's 'la Vie Nouvelle' explores one man's obsession and fall into a base and instinctive human. With extraordinary visual flair Grandrieux introduces us to an un-named war torn Eastern European city where Zachary Knighton's soldier on leave falls for a 'dancer' in a sleazy club.

With sparse dialogue and complex narrative we understand the complexities of the soldier's feelings, his love of his closest friend and the simplicity of morals in a city razed to concrete. Grandrieux approach to his camera work and sound design forces you to become involved in the characters, he brings us close to their emotional point of view never allowing us too far back form the action. Indeed at times we are so intimately close to the characters' mindset that it can be hard to not turn away in horror.

indeed, whilst this film is in some ways 'another European art-house film...' it could also be classified as a film in the horror genre, the final sequence involving the soldier's friends is shocking and violent.

This is an important film from a director with plenty to say and who is clearly bold enough to say it differently and with considerable force.

see this film