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"Controversial French movies are gay"

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Mon 07/04/03 at 05:00
Regular
Posts: 787
The Daily Mail doesn't get angry very often. It's a well-known advocate of liberalism and open-mindedness (unlike that bigotted Guardian rag). However, some people know just how to rub it up the wrong way. Chris Morris for one with his sick, depraved take on paedophilia or Cradle of Filth with their Jesus baiting line of merchandise. But no-one has managed to wind the paper up quite as successfully as Gaspar Noé, the sick mind behind such films as Seul Contre Tous, Baise Moi and most recently Irreversible. I suspect that he has actually induced coronaries in a number of Daily Mail journalists.

Noé's an odd kinda guy. Rumour has it that he had to flee the auditorium during Straw Dogs' notorious rape scene. Most ordinary men would have pursued a career of being really very outraged thereafter, but not Noé. Being the sick puppy that he probably is, he decided that his life's goal was to make a film more controversial than Straw Dogs and Salo put together. That's some feat. Salo is one of cinema's more controversial moments. It's by a guy named Pier Pablo Pasolini who wasn't allowed to be a Communist because he was gay and Catholic, and who wasn't allowed to be Catholic because he was gay and Communist, and a lot of gays didn't like him because he was a Catholic Communist. He died after being stabbed, allegedly by someone he had made advances towards, but many believed he was assassinated. Anyway this unusual mixture of gay, catholic Communism produced a film set in Fascist Italy in which a group of men and women take a load of teenagers up into the mountains and do generally depraved things in line with the Marquis de Sade's 120 days of Sodom and talk conceptual crap about power and religion in between. I've not seen it all because I couldn't watch it. It's pretty shocking.

This is the thing Noé's pitched himself at doing. Seul Contre Tous was a pretty good start. It was so shocking that it carried a warning 15 minutes before the end giving all viewers a one minute period in which to leave the cinema before the real controversy was unleashed. It put him on the map. Then he got involved with Baise-moi. It's written and directed by a former prostitute and stars two porn stars. One gets raped in the opening few minutes and the other sees her best friend being shot. They join up and go on the rampage across France. Kind of like Thelma and Louise with guns and blood and real sex and no production values. It's a stupid film. It's shot without lighting on awful grainy DV has a monotonous plot of shooting and sex and shooting and sex and then some. It's not arty and however clever it thinks it's being, it's not.

But that is what Noé does. His films are designed purely to shock. and that's just about the only thing Baise-Moi did well. It pushed the daily Mail's buttons. Rargh sick french porno rape gun violence fest they screamed. Cue massive publicity and a widening of the film's release. Hell, it probably wouldn't have even got distributed here if it hadn't kicked up such a storm. If the Mail had just accepted that it was a crap film and done a little review saying yeah whatever the film sucks then no-one would have bothered about it. Instead they blow a gasket and Noé gets his kicks.

Irreversible doesn't fall into quite the same category, because unlike Baise-Moi it has some limited pluses. It's well shot and well acted for starters. Problem is it's entirely constructed around Monica Bellucci getting raped for 10 minutes and making the audience feel as uncomfortable as possible during that period. When I saw it at the cinema, only four people were left by the end of the film, the rest walked out. Equally, ignoring all the balls you hear about the film being a deep study of original sin or the male psyche, the film is empty on any other level. If anything it's an in-joke between Noé and Vincent Cassel, who Noé approached saying he wanted to make a film in which Cassel and his wife Bellucci had sex, "so you think you're Kubrick now?" was Cassel's reply. Cue a film which goes to great lengths to reference Kubrick in terms of music, themes and even dotting around posters from Kubrick films. Irreversible's raison d'être is to shock and nothing more. It's a challenge to see if you can sit through the whole film. And that's not really anything to write home about.

It seems that Noé's missed the point about Straw Dogs and Salo. Neither film's primary aim was to shock, in both cases it was a by-product of far mroe significant things the directors were trying to accomplish. In Peckinpah's case the controversy arose because of his implication that Susan George's character wanted to be raped, part of Peckinpah's general distrust of women and his view that the world was a crappy corrupt place in anyone can be bought by power or money. Pasolini, on the other hand, tried to reconcile his gay Catholic Communism in his films and shocked everyone in the process, as it's a pretty small demographic to aim for. Noé's films serve no other purpose than to push the buttons of people he know won't watch them but will still be jolly outraged anyway.

Perhaps the Mail could learn a thing or two from France, where the atmosphere's a little more liberal and the papers don't throw hissy fits when provoked. If the film stinks then they'll acknowledge it and move on. And when a film's only purpose is to be controversial then it's really stupid to proceed to be outraged about it. It's like the guy at my school who got really wound up because someone said he was easy to wind up. It's stupid.

Still it's always fun to watch the Daily Mail get its knickers in a twist..
Mon 07/04/03 at 08:58
Regular
"Infantalised Forums"
Posts: 23,089
Mr. Happy wrote:
> The Daily Mail doesn't get angry very often. It's a well-known
> advocate of liberalism and open-mindedness (unlike that bigotted
> Guardian rag).
---

Sorry?
*reads again*
The Daily Mail is one of the most Victorian, middle-England repressed things I've ever read in my life.

I saw Base Moi at the weekend.
It had naked chicks and guns.
And sex and naked chicks and guns.

I liked it.
Haven't seen Irreversible because the idea of watching a 9 minute rape-scene doesn't appeal whatsoever.
*shrugs*

Dog Soldiers is good.
Straw Dogs is alright.
Mon 07/04/03 at 05:00
Regular
"funky blitzkreig"
Posts: 2,540
The Daily Mail doesn't get angry very often. It's a well-known advocate of liberalism and open-mindedness (unlike that bigotted Guardian rag). However, some people know just how to rub it up the wrong way. Chris Morris for one with his sick, depraved take on paedophilia or Cradle of Filth with their Jesus baiting line of merchandise. But no-one has managed to wind the paper up quite as successfully as Gaspar Noé, the sick mind behind such films as Seul Contre Tous, Baise Moi and most recently Irreversible. I suspect that he has actually induced coronaries in a number of Daily Mail journalists.

Noé's an odd kinda guy. Rumour has it that he had to flee the auditorium during Straw Dogs' notorious rape scene. Most ordinary men would have pursued a career of being really very outraged thereafter, but not Noé. Being the sick puppy that he probably is, he decided that his life's goal was to make a film more controversial than Straw Dogs and Salo put together. That's some feat. Salo is one of cinema's more controversial moments. It's by a guy named Pier Pablo Pasolini who wasn't allowed to be a Communist because he was gay and Catholic, and who wasn't allowed to be Catholic because he was gay and Communist, and a lot of gays didn't like him because he was a Catholic Communist. He died after being stabbed, allegedly by someone he had made advances towards, but many believed he was assassinated. Anyway this unusual mixture of gay, catholic Communism produced a film set in Fascist Italy in which a group of men and women take a load of teenagers up into the mountains and do generally depraved things in line with the Marquis de Sade's 120 days of Sodom and talk conceptual crap about power and religion in between. I've not seen it all because I couldn't watch it. It's pretty shocking.

This is the thing Noé's pitched himself at doing. Seul Contre Tous was a pretty good start. It was so shocking that it carried a warning 15 minutes before the end giving all viewers a one minute period in which to leave the cinema before the real controversy was unleashed. It put him on the map. Then he got involved with Baise-moi. It's written and directed by a former prostitute and stars two porn stars. One gets raped in the opening few minutes and the other sees her best friend being shot. They join up and go on the rampage across France. Kind of like Thelma and Louise with guns and blood and real sex and no production values. It's a stupid film. It's shot without lighting on awful grainy DV has a monotonous plot of shooting and sex and shooting and sex and then some. It's not arty and however clever it thinks it's being, it's not.

But that is what Noé does. His films are designed purely to shock. and that's just about the only thing Baise-Moi did well. It pushed the daily Mail's buttons. Rargh sick french porno rape gun violence fest they screamed. Cue massive publicity and a widening of the film's release. Hell, it probably wouldn't have even got distributed here if it hadn't kicked up such a storm. If the Mail had just accepted that it was a crap film and done a little review saying yeah whatever the film sucks then no-one would have bothered about it. Instead they blow a gasket and Noé gets his kicks.

Irreversible doesn't fall into quite the same category, because unlike Baise-Moi it has some limited pluses. It's well shot and well acted for starters. Problem is it's entirely constructed around Monica Bellucci getting raped for 10 minutes and making the audience feel as uncomfortable as possible during that period. When I saw it at the cinema, only four people were left by the end of the film, the rest walked out. Equally, ignoring all the balls you hear about the film being a deep study of original sin or the male psyche, the film is empty on any other level. If anything it's an in-joke between Noé and Vincent Cassel, who Noé approached saying he wanted to make a film in which Cassel and his wife Bellucci had sex, "so you think you're Kubrick now?" was Cassel's reply. Cue a film which goes to great lengths to reference Kubrick in terms of music, themes and even dotting around posters from Kubrick films. Irreversible's raison d'être is to shock and nothing more. It's a challenge to see if you can sit through the whole film. And that's not really anything to write home about.

It seems that Noé's missed the point about Straw Dogs and Salo. Neither film's primary aim was to shock, in both cases it was a by-product of far mroe significant things the directors were trying to accomplish. In Peckinpah's case the controversy arose because of his implication that Susan George's character wanted to be raped, part of Peckinpah's general distrust of women and his view that the world was a crappy corrupt place in anyone can be bought by power or money. Pasolini, on the other hand, tried to reconcile his gay Catholic Communism in his films and shocked everyone in the process, as it's a pretty small demographic to aim for. Noé's films serve no other purpose than to push the buttons of people he know won't watch them but will still be jolly outraged anyway.

Perhaps the Mail could learn a thing or two from France, where the atmosphere's a little more liberal and the papers don't throw hissy fits when provoked. If the film stinks then they'll acknowledge it and move on. And when a film's only purpose is to be controversial then it's really stupid to proceed to be outraged about it. It's like the guy at my school who got really wound up because someone said he was easy to wind up. It's stupid.

Still it's always fun to watch the Daily Mail get its knickers in a twist..

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