![]() Garance Marillier and Rabah Naït Oufella in Raw. That’s because it’s alive with moments of splatter poetry, relating Justine’s transformation on a vivid, expressionistic level, with the simple image of a white lab coat stained with dark-red blood as its skeleton key. Suppose this cannibalistic coming-of-age story often feels like a nouveau art piece. Through the filmmaker’s collaboration with cinematographer Ruben Impens, Raw becomes a feast for the eyes as well. Surrounded by farm-animal carcasses and surrendering to their base impulses, students in this surreal animal kingdom of campus have embraced a more primal side, which encourages Justine to unleash her own. As students descend a stairwell, their placement within its concrete angles suggests blood pumping through aortic chambers in the heart of some terrible beast. Pressed together, they make green, and the way Ducournau shoots their limbs sliding achieves the surreal sense of bodies merging in forced, ungainly unison. Slathered in blue paint, Justine ends up in a bathroom with a male student doused in yellow. ![]() Its erotic, otherworldly tableaux contrasting with the cold, oddly unempathetic nature of its academia, the school becomes an unreal, womblike space - all the better for letting Justine be reborn. ![]() Even in this debut feature, the filmmaker has a preternatural knack for knowing where to place her camera that can make the mundane instantly mesmerizing. Focus WorldĮqually pivotal to Justine’s transformation - tracked with intense focus and vicious gallows humor by Ducournau, who also wrote the script - is the dreamlike atmosphere of the institution around her. Marillier is a hypnotic screen presence, and it’s the childlike curiosity and gnawing absence in her gaze - though, of what, we’re not quite sure - that makes Justine such an endlessly surprising and unsettling protagonist. But as her cravings intensify, it’s not difficult to imagine a darker fate for this quick, hungering study. Justine’s emotional distance when it comes to matters of the flesh might make her a great doctor one day. And when Alexia’s efforts to give Justine a painful-looking Brazilian go skin-crawlingly south, a gruesome accident with scissors leads Justine to try human flesh for the first time.Īll of this experimentation plays out against the drab, antiseptic confines of the vet school, where students carve open animal carcasses with grim purpose, and body parts float in jars filled with formaldehyde. Soon, Justine’s craving for meat leads her to devour hamburger patties and raw chicken breast. Absent-mindedly chewing her hair leads to an equally disgusting outcome, as she coughs up strands of hair like matted ribbons. Later, Justine awakens to discover her skin peeling due to a nasty, flaking rash. Justine is even more taken aback when her older sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) pushes meat on her during one hazing ritual, forcing her to eat a raw rabbit kidney. With Titane in theaters, it’s time to revisit Raw - luckily, it’s streaming on Netflix.Īll of this experimentation plays out against the drab, antiseptic confines of the vet school. Half a decade before Titane propelled Ducournau to her current heights, Raw cemented the filmmaker as a ferociously imaginative, fast-rising talent. The filmmaker first made her mark in 2016 with her dazzling feature debut Raw, about a young woman who begins to crave human flesh while at veterinary school. Metamorphosis - the more physically icky and narratively oblique, the better - is at the heart of her ferociously feminist horror movies. Whenever Ducournau’s at the wheel, she’s seemingly fueled by instinct, animal impulse, and a fascinatingly amorphous view of metaphor. Yet the relentless, cage-rattling thrill of Titane (now in theaters) is that it goes nowhere you’d expect, racing forward in pursuit of a singular, savage vision without mapping out its ultimate direction (tonal or otherwise). After the French filmmaker’s Palme d’Or-winning sophomore feature Titane, about a female serial murderer carnally inclined toward cars, that much is indisputable.
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