Mange, ceci est mon corps

EAT, FOR THIS IS MY BODY heralds the arrival of a major filmmaker, Michelange Quay. He was born in Queens, New York in 1974 to Haitian parents. The family moved to South Florida as Quay was entering his teens. At the University of Miami, while majoring in anthropology, Quay took a course in film studies that changed his life. He returned to New York and obtained a Masters in Film from NYU. His parents retired and moved to Haiti while Quay settled in Paris. The young man has maintained very close ties to Haiti throughout his life. In 2004, he released The Gospel of the Creole Pig, a short dealing with Haiti-USA relations in a unique poetic parable style. It won Best Short Film at the Milan and Stockholm festivals and a cadre of influential admirers. Most importantly, it became a calling card that secured funding for Eat, For This Is My Body and facilitated the casting of Catherine Samie of the Comedy-Francaise and A-list actress Sylvie Testud in it.

Quay's feature debut is a bona fide art film in that poetic parable mode of his that marks him as an iconoclast and a visionary filmmaker. It opens at sea with an aerial tracking shot that takes you past the shore over a shantytown populated by black people and continues over hills and a barren landscape; it's Haiti but it could be Martinique, or Jamaica, or any number of former European colonies in Africa or the Americas. A match cut, made imperative by the fact we are actually over France's Loire Valley, takes us past more empty terrain into a plantation manor. It's helpful to think of the scenes that follow as the stanzas of a poem and to think of the characters not simply as individuals but also as archetypes. There is a matriarch (Catherine Samie), a pale, frail old lady who bathes in a vat of cream and delivers an intense monologue while sitting in bed in an all-white room. Her diatribe conveys her sense of entitlement and racial superiority over the natives. It's shot in close-up, not unlike monologues in Ingmar Bergman films like Cries and Whispers.

The other white woman at the manor (Sylvie Testud), who could be the matriarch's daughter, is addressed as Madame. She displays a more outwardly benign view of "the others" and will, before the end of the film, leave the manor to circulate among them, perhaps in an attempt to understand them. But first, perhaps the film's centerpiece: a dozen boys arrive at the manor to dine with Madame, are made to bathe, shave their heads (evocation of comparable scenes in Salo and Full Metal Jacket might not be coincidental since Quay openly admires both Pasolini and Kubrick), and wear what Quay describes as "monkey suits". They sit around a table but the white plates remain empty while Madame in ritual form teaches them gratitude by having them exclaim "Merci" repeatedly, like a mantra. Cut to same setup with Madame replaced by a big sponge cake with white icing. The boys stare at it, poke it, then taste it, eat it with their hands and finally fling it all over the place.

If the scenes as the manor look like tableaux vivants, the scenes outside have a naturalistic, almost anthropological quality. A woman gives birth; a group of old women perform a raucous santeria or voodoo ceremony as Quay's camera draws circles around them; a hand-held camera follows Madame as she walks the town streets observing all kinds of quotidian activities, the natives stare back at the unusual presence in their midst. These scenes serve to establish a contrast. Eat, for This Is My Body constitutes a mostly visual dialectic between first world and third world, white and black, master and servant, empire and colony. It makes ample use of symbolism, some of it ambiguous enough to sustain different interpretations. It is however, shortsighted to describe it as an essay or non-narrative film because however poetic and, perhaps, digressive, Eat, For This Is My Body adds up to a parable with recognizable story elements.

The great auteur Robert Bresson made this exhortation: "Make visible what without you might perhaps never have been seen". Michelange Quay has done just that. His feature debut is a resonant work of supreme beauty and power that couldn't have been made by anyone else.

This peculiar film has no apparent narrative. It is an assemblage of extended vignettes, a few documentarian in style, the rest fiction. The formal and deliberate acting taunts us for an explanation. It's anyone's guess. The goings-on are sufficiently elliptical to be interpreted according to one's prejudices.

My own overall take and attempt at extracting meaning was to see the film as a long meditation on the difficult relationship between humans and mother nature. She says "eat, for this is my body". Humanity, as played in part by nearly a dozen orphan boys, is most willing. Offered a very large cake, the boys start tentatively at first to sample the gooey icing but it doesn't take long for the tasting to degenerate into wasteful and wanton trashing. An apt metaphor for our times.

The metaphorical imagery keeps on coming: mother earth boiled to death (global warming?), a fun scene of carnival and jam packed streets (overpopulation?), etc. Others are harder to decipher and may only be intended as side commentaries on the human condition: an ember eating shaman of sorts during a religious ceremony (the power of magic?), a keyboard instrument that makes repeated appearances (human industry?), various scenes with what is purportedly milk (life sustaining mother's milk?), etc.

One character I was unsure of was mother nature's daughter. I eventually placed her as a carrier for political interpretations that did not exclude racial, class and first-versus-third-world issues. The racial overtones seem particularly salient even though somewhat oblique. In a beautifully shot scene a black man is transformed to have white skin while otherwise retaining other features (was an albino man used?) and that allows him to approach the daughter no longer as a servant.

If all this tentative interpretation sounds far-fetched, don't worry. The film can be experienced purely as an art-house visual and theatrical construction. The color dichotomy of black and white for example can be limited to an aesthetic. The music is well chosen, enjoyable and even exquisite. There are a few sound design surprises of which the male piano player is the most memorable example.

The only time I fidgeted in my seat was the "merci" scene when hungry kids are asked to imagine food in their empty bowls and give thanks (another political/religious metaphor?). It goes on for too long. I came close to leaving the theater, but gladly I did not.

This is the director's first feature. It's nice when someone new comes around to nudge conventions. It's all more powerful when it's done with competent camera work and intriguing sound design. It's impressive when young kids can be directed to largely improvise a critical scene, that of the cake, in one single take.

Shot partially in the Loire valley, where the castle we see is located, and Port-au-Prince.