Film Review
More than a decade after her debut feature
Innocence (2004), director
Lucile Hadzihalilovic returns to our screens with another, even more puzzling
and idiosyncratic foray into early adolescent sexuality. Positively
wallowing in its oneiric oddness,
Évolution has no trouble
claiming the title of the strangest French film of 2016, so unlike anything
else on offer this year that it looks like something that has fallen through
a wormhole to a parallel reality. It's apparent that the film is intended
to be an allegory of male pubescence, feeding hungrily on the murkier neuroses
therein, but it approaches this theme from such a skew-wiff angle that it
can just as easily be enjoyed as a piece of pure escapism - part mystical
poem, part sci-fi fantasy, one that gives a disturbing new meaning to the
term
navel-gazing.
Despite the promise of her early work, Hadzihalilovic has had a much harder
time establishing herself than her partner, Gaspar Noé, with whom
she worked on their first films. Hadzihalilovic shares
both Noé's visual flair and his penchant for the provocative and unfamiliar,
although her work to date has been somewhat less startling.
Évolution
is (appropriately enough) the film where Hadzihalilovic appears to have finally
come of age, forging her identity with a style of cinema that appears bizarre
even by Noé's exceptional standards. The B-movie sci-fi plot,
about an isolated community of women performing experiments on young boys
to turn them into baby producers, is merely the jumping off point for a lurid
visual fantasy that abounds with macabre poetry and icky body horror creepiness.
This is not the kind of film that tends to do well in France - French cinema
is famously deficient in the horror genre - but it stands up well against
comparable excursions into nightmarish unreality by such masters of the genre
as Lucio Fulci and David Cronenberg. Let down slightly by a plot
that is persistently vague throughout and fails to reach a satisfactory resolution,
Évolution still makes a tremendous impact by virtue of its
stark, imaginatively composed visuals. With its jet black beaches and
lack of vegetation, Lanzarote provides a suitably alien-looking location
for this dive into the unknown, but what impresses most are the eerie underwater
sequences, which lend a distinctive lyrical flavour to the film. Tapping
into fears that stay with us long after the traumas of puberty have passed,
Évolution feels more like a nightmare experience than a film.
© James Travers 2017
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
Somewhere on a remote stretch of coast there lives a community of women and
young boys. Nicolas is an eleven-year-old who lives with his mother
and is beginning to ask himself questions about the life he is leading.
Every so often, like all of the other boys in the village, he is taken to
a hospital where he receives a strange treatment, the purpose of which is
never explained to him. Nicolas is anxious for answers but his mother
seems reluctant to enlighten him. His curiosity leads him to spy on
his mother when she goes out at night to join the other women on the beach,
where they take part in some mysterious ritual. Nicolas's only
confidante is a young nurse at the hospital. Perhaps she may be able
to help him to uncover the truth about his increasingly bizarre existence...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.