La vie nouvelle

You'd be hard put to find rubbish more noxious than Grandrieux's LA VIE NOUVELLE (NEW LIFE) in a dozen metal cannister's at the local dump.

I like stuff that experiments, but I despise stuff that experiments with nothing on its mind -- or certainly nothing that the director is capable of communicating.

Essentially, it's the tiresome story of a pimp wanting to own and abuse a hooker. In some camps, that simple synopsis might sound promising, but you'll be retreating fast once you see said synopsis executed (poorly).

We get long, disconnected, blurred images, a wanky soundtrack, actors moping, sex scenes that are boring and interminable and nude girls who'd be better off clothed.

This flick was recommended to me by the head of a major international film festival who thought it was right up my alley. I'm insulted that he'd think I'd buy this trash.

Staying to the end of the screening took iron discipline and now I want my two hours back.

Nauseaus.

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.

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.

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.

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*