Film Review
The true story of a 19th century liaison between a vagabond and the
daughter of a bourgeois household provides director Benoît
Jacquot with the perfect excuse to revisit some of his favourite
themes, including the nature of sexual desire and a woman's yearning
for escape from a repressive milieu.
Au fond des bois is Jacquot's
darkest film to date and also his most ambiguous, as it leaves much to
the spectator's imagination and does not attempt to answer all the
questions it poses. A masterfully constructed period piece which
cannot help evoking three of François Truffaut's best films -
L'Enfant sauvage (1969),
Les Deux Anglaises et le continent
(1971) and
L'Histoire d'Adèle H.
(1975) - it explores the potency and mystique of desire with the
perspicacity and honesty that we have come to expect from one of
France's leading auteur filmmakers.
Now in her fifth Benoît Jacquot film, Isild Le Besco is shaping
up to be the director's ideal muse and is perfectly suited to play the
ambiguous heroine whose sexual awakening in the course of the film
pummels our senses with the brutality of an erupting volcano.
Equally well-cast as the satyr-like tramp who unleashes Le Besco's
passions is the charismatic Argentinean actor Nahuel Perez Biscayart,
who was first revealed in Pablo Fendrik's
La Sangre Brota (2008). The
contrast between Le Besco's repressed Joséphine (portrayed as a
mix of fairytale princess and Brontë-esque heroine) and
Biscayart's wild child Timothée is at first striking, leaving us
in no doubt who is the victim and who is the tormenter. But
things are not always what they first seem and in the course of the
film the mantle of innocence shifts from one character to the other, so
that ultimately it is Timothée who steals our sympathies, the
victim of a terrible conspiracy of circumstances.
The initial seduction of Joséphine by Timothée is
terrifying to watch and culminates in a rape of bestial
intensity. It really does look as if Joséphine is
succumbing to a mystical enchantment and has no power to resist
Timothée as he lures her away from the safe bosom of her home
into the naked savagery of the woods, where more sordid Pagan
shenanigans await her. Yet we soon begin to wonder whether seeing
is believing, whether what we are in fact witnessing is not reality but
a fiction created by Joséphine as she gives herself unwittingly
to her first sexual adventure. To someone experiencing these
primitive passions for the first time, the sexual impulse can so easily
be interpreted as an act demonic possession, and so Joséphine
imagines herself to be under the spell of a sorcerer, unable to resist
the savage act of deflowering that she is subjected to.
When she is returned to civilisation after her frenzied frolic in the
foliage, Joséphine persuades herself and others that she was
abducted against her will, unable to accept that she could be an equal
participant in such a vile exhibition of carnal self-indulgence.
The scales of justice naturally turn against the outsider, who must
therefore be punished for corrupting an innocent. The truth of
the amorous encounter is not one that a civilised bourgeois society can
accept, and so whilst a calculating young woman embarks on a
predictably passionless marriage, an innocent languishes in prison, the
real victim of that age-old enchantment which defies understanding.
The exquisite subtlety of Jacquot's sparse screenplay is supremely
well-served by his flawless mise-en-scène and two
outstanding central performances which provide the
most vivid and unsettling depiction of a passionate romantic
encounter. What starts out as something akin to a Gothic
nightmare evolves into a kind of idyllic fairytale, a transition that
powerfully evokes a young woman's mastery over her own sexuality.
A haunting and insightful film,
Au
fond des bois embraces familiar themes with startling
originality and maturity and is arguably Jacquot's most accomplished
film to date - a film that celebrates the mystery of sex but shocks us
with its terrifying destructive power.
© James Travers 2013
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Next Benoît Jacquot film:
Les Adieux à la reine (2012)
Film Synopsis
In 1865, Joséphine leads a comfortable but dull existence with
her father, a successful physician. One day, a scruffy vagabond
turns up on her father's doorstep asking for help. The stranger,
Timothée, becomes an object of fascination for her father, but
Joséphine is instinctively afraid of him and senses he is
exerting a strange magnetic control over her. A short while
later, Joséphine is lured by Timothée away from her home,
into the countryside nearby. Here, they live like wild animals,
free from the laws of man. But when Joséphine returns to
her home, she is convinced that Timothée took her away against
her will, and testifies as much when the tramp is tried for abducting
her...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.