InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 10

FESTIVAL COVERAGE
working class, even when conniving, are good at heart. In what is
often functionally airplane fodder, the disparity between the
characters in itself is not enough conflict, and there must always
be a stark villain in the equation. The Origin of Evil does muddy its
waters a bit, with the addition of Stéphane’s girlfriend (Suzanne
Clement), who’s currently serving a five-year prison sentence.
The relationship between the two women serves to counteract
the façade of a perfect liar driven only by necessity, and the
film’s queerness is a pleasant surprise even if it isn’t textually
central. But where the film’s greatest benefit comes from its
particular context: French commercial cinema tends toward the
most trying forms of comedy — see, for example, the popularity
of the insufferable Astérix & Obélix franchise — so the self-aware
genre homage of The Origin of Evil is much welcome, even if it
doesn’t break any new ground.— SARAH WILLIAMS
SATURN BOWLING
Patricia Mazuy
Patricia Mazuy, now six films deep in a three-decade-plus career
with Saturn Bowling, has always risked a certain, tantrum-centric
filmmaking, favoring characters with shared psychoses who butt
heads with one another and all those around them. She alienates
via general unpleasantness, but it’s even more rewarding to
penetrate those barriers and discover the primalness that
charges her work. In a filmography populated by violent
burnouts, obsessives, and the like, Saturn Bowling still earns the
distinction of being her most male film.
A pair of mildly estranged half-brothers, Armand (Achille
Reggiani) and Guillaume (Arieh Worthalter), tenuously reunite
following their father’s death, when it comes time to decide
ownership of the family’s beloved, subterranean bowling alley.
The former is effectively unhoused, spending his nights at his
club security job after everyone’s left; he’s also desperate for sex,
ogling any and all exposed flesh, masturbating in the rain,
deploying failed pickup lines. Guillaume, too busy with his police
work, offers the bowling alley to Armand, who also gets their
father’s opulent apartment, decked out with snakeskin jackets,
hunting trophies, rifles, and a German Shepard. It’s not long
before Armand, his lack of self-control already telegraphed,
commits a murder or two.
Mazuy attempts an impressive gambit of divided perspectives,
Armand’s unsettlingly impressionistic subjectivity shifts to a
more procedural temperament after that first shock of violence.
The first murder explains the rest, and thus, we’re only subjected
to one interval of absolutely misogynistic depravity; to achieve
restraint, Mazuy indulges just once. Guillaume has to shoulder
that moral weight of suspecting his half-brother, while
navigating the vicissitudes of his own life. The film admittedly
loses momentum as it mounts toward a more straightforward
climax that isn’t exactly expected from the prologue’s
disorienting visual and aural excisions, where the dramatic
development lumbers along in a gait similar to the seething
Armand. Perhaps if Saturn Bowling were intent on a more equal
alternation between brothers, as in 1989’s Thick Skinned, it would
play as less mismatched than it ultimately is. Thankfully, then, at
least, the muscle of this experiment is still commendable enough
in and of itself, leaving plenty enough to chew on despite some
notable imbalance. — PATRICK PREZIOSI
FOREVER YOUNG
Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi
The latest film from French actor-director Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi
is difficult to evaluate. One could argue that, for what it is, it is
fairly accomplished. A showcase for mostly young talent,
including some performers making their film debut, Forever
Young is exuberantly melodramatic, the film’s form matching its
protagonists’ heightened emotions and desperation to be
understood. I suspect that a certain kind of viewer might well
find Bruni-Tedeschi’s film swoony and romantic, a full-throttle
tribute to the heedlessness of young adulthood.
All of which is to say that Forever Young is two solid hours of
theater-kid energy, a film that wholeheartedly believes that the
art of acting is a beautiful, agonized, possibly holy mission, and if
(like me) you don’t exactly subscribe to that ideology, this is an
incredibly irritating film. Its French title, Les Amandiers, refers to
a real-life theater studies program that Bruni-Tedeschi herself
took part in in the late 1980s, one that was led by legendary film
and stage director Patrice Chéreau (here played by the
omnipresent Louis Garrel). But the English title, probably
intended as a celebration of the freedom of youth, actually
betrays a deep investment in arrested development.
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