BHFF '18: Knife + Heart

Un couteau dans le coeur
***½/****
starring Vanessa Paradis, Nicolas Maury, Kate Moran, Jonathan Genet
screenplay by Yann Gonzalez, Cristiano Mangione
directed by Yann Gonzalez

by Walter Chaw Yann Gonzalez's Knife + Heart is a smart film by a smart filmmaker. It's a movie-lover's fugue, a tribute to the heyday of gay porn and the grindhouse theatres that showed it, a salute to editors, a shrine to multi-cultural myths about birds. It's a deep well with obvious pleasures, a film with a recognizable structure complete with solution that still manages to avoid the standard exposition and perfunctory resolution. The spiritual brother to Brian De Palma's Body Double (exploitative and sleazy and also commentary on exploitation and sleaze), it's a movie about looking that has as its central image a blind grackle--an extinct variety of the common pest that used to bring folks back from the dead by burning off the ever-after as it flew too close to the sun. Its central couple is gay-porn director Anne (Vanessa Paradis) and her editor and former lover Lois (Kate Moran), who churn out the sort of softcore masterpieces of art-film erotica favoured once upon a time by your Kenneth Angers, your Paul Morrisseys and Radley Metzgers. All of her work is autobiographical in some way. There's no line separating Anne's reality, nor her dreamlife, from the mindscreen of her movies.

When Anne's ingénues start dying, one-by-one, her dreams grow lurid and her films follow suit, and Knife + Heart itself comes stylistically unhinged. The first murder is a lovely, hallucinogenic, très De Palma sequence cutting between one of Anne's 16mm masterpieces and the stalking and brutal sex-murder of delicate Fouad (Khaled Alouach) by a masked heavy-breather. It reminds in this moment, too, of Paul Etheredge-Ouzts's exceptional slasher Hellbent, which subverts traditional slasher tropes by porting them over faithfully, and with wisdom, onto gay archetypes. But Knife + Heart has something else in mind. Not content to just be an overtly homosexual giallo, it wants to engage in a conversation about making movies--how objects of desire become internalized object-choices for the young, perhaps, the repressed almost certainly. It aligns most closely, then, with Michael Powell's Peeping Tom in its fascination with looking and the link between desire and fear, sex and sadism, gender politics as they play out in physical and emotional power. A scene where Anne, in a tunnel, tries to rape Lois out of frustration at Lois's rejection of her is amazing for the way this kind of aggression between two women casts a wholly different light on the act. A murder in a haunted forest is shot like the Redwood sequence in Vertigo, spinning around our victim while his killer appears as a shadow behind him. It follows a sequence where Anne's fortune is told as a doomed love story, and precedes another where a dream becomes at once recital of what's happened and prophecy of what's to come.

Knife + Heart is high camp on the surface and film school underneath. Gonzalez has a strong sense of what makes those old no-budget pornos fun and an equally strong sense of how and where those films intersect with the likes of Godard and Hitchcock. As a genre exercise, it's unerring and true. Its ending feels like Tom DiCillo's Living in Oblivion, with the true voice of the struggling auteur finding itself in a meaningful project that will likely attract only a handful of supporters, much less admirers. There's a scene in a porn theatre where, among the lonely masturbators, a middle-aged guy in tweed (Christophe Bier) tells Anne he's seen all her stuff and that this is her masterpiece. Knife + Heart even has time to give a nod to the positive relationship critics can have, and traditionally have had, to art--and how critics are in fact bigger champions of the things they like than any casual moviegoer could ever claim to be. All of these moments serve as waypoints along the journey of a whodunit that ultimately exposes the cost of intolerance on society, as well as the visceral impact of art on the internal lives of the audience. It's most assuredly about something. At the end of it, when the murderer is unmasked, it's not by the detective missing an eyelid (Yann Collette), but by the artist telling her story in the medium of her choice. Knife + Heart is about honouring a voice, torpedoes be damned. It's great.