La vie nouvelle

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.

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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.

If you are a fan of bleak, depressing cinema, there is a whole range of interesting films you could watch. There are the realistic attempts of Haneke, you could try the stylized madness of Aronofski or you could dig deeper and immerse yourself in the vileness of Gaspar Noé. Maybe try some late Moodysson to push the boundaries. You won't walk away refreshed from any of these directors.

And then there is La Vie Nouvelle.

I've seen my fair share of depressing movies but little dare come near the territory where La Vie Nouvelle resides. The closest comparison to make is Irreversible's Rectum scene expanded to a full 100 minutes. Grandrieux doesn't make it easy for those watching his film. Little dialog is used and the background story is sketchy at best. Hardly any information reaches the viewer of the things he is witnessing, yet this is largely unimportant to understand the core of the film.

A lot of the film's punch comes from the darkened visuals. Not a single bright, positive color is seen throughout the film. Everything is shot in saturated, bleak colors, leaving little to no sign of hope. As the film progresses, the camera work becomes more and more frantic, positioning itself close to the actors and serving the viewer a mess of blurry shapes and suggestive images. Many shots are out of focus and often people are only visible as dark outlines against muddy backgrounds.

Aside from the visuals, the soundtrack is just as dirty as the images. There is hardly any dialog and quite a few scenes are simply silent. Sometimes this silence is disturbed by creepy illbient and muffled sounds. Later in the film, more and more rhythmic electronic sounds enter the film. And to top that, Grandrieux plays nasty tricks with the volume to increase the ill effect.

This nightmarish atmosphere climaxes in an inverted black and white scene. Shots of agonized faces, screaming mouths and mud-covered, crawling bodies are accompanied by distorted screams and brooding illbient music. The moment Grandrieux cranks up the volume this scene becomes immortal.

There's little story to be followed, and even if there was I really didn't care much for it. The movie is set in the underground and has no shame in showing the worst side of human kind. Sexual abuse, physical violence and power struggles dominate the movie, although in terms of actual perversities the film is not all that shocking.

La Vie Nouvelle is not a film that is fun to watch. But it is an impressive film that succeeds as no other in putting down a vile, bleak and uneasy atmosphere. Some parts of the movie were hard to sit through, even repulsive and just felt wrong. Which is something I haven't felt in a long time, and I don't think I've ever felt it as strongly in a film before.

This feeling is not something everyone will appreciate, but if you're looking for a depressing film which will sucker punch you across the room, you can't find much better than this one. It will be one of those films I need to own on DVD to never watch it again. 4.5*/5.0*

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.

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.