Film Review
For his fourth feature,
Fou d'amour,
director Philippe Ramos revisits the subject of a short film he made
almost twenty years previously,
Ici-bas
(1996), which recounted a real-life crime (the so-called
Affaire de curé d'Uruffe)
that was a big news story in France in the mid-1950s. The
Catholic priest Guy Desnoyers made the headlines after brutally killing
the mistress he had made pregnant, along with her unborn baby - a crime
for which he was sentenced to forced labour for the rest of his life
following his confession. In his typically idiosyncratic film,
Ramos does not underplay the gruesome nature of Desnoyers's crime (be
prepared for some pretty disturbing images in the film's final act),
but he clearly wants us to be on the side of the priest, presenting him
less as a debauched maniac and more as a tragic innocent, the victim of
a hypocritical society and those inscrutable cosmic agencies that shape
our destinies.
Fou d'amour is a significant
departure from Ramos's previous films, sombre period offerings that
include the Moby Dick-inspired
Capitaine Achab (2007) and Joan
of Arc drama
Jeanne captive
(2011). After a macabre opening depicting the guillotining of a
man who turns out to be the main protagonist, the film starts out in a
cheekily humorous vein, with more than an echo of those saucy French
comedies of the 1970s - Joël Séria's
Les Galettes de Pont-Aven
(1975) springs readily to mind. Taking his cue from Billy
Wilder's
Sunset Boulevard (1950), Ramos
allows his main character (reduced to a decapitated head set in a
Christ-like pose) to tell his story in flashback after his death, so
it's no surprise that he comes across as a living saint - an impression
that Ramos mischievously reinforces with some tableaux carefully
arranged to imitate devotional paintings. By combining the erotic
and the metaphysical, the film evokes the work of the controversial
writer Georges Bataille. As well as having an active interest in
various forms of human perversion, Bataille also founded a secret
society that had a thing about human sacrifice and whose symbol was a
headless man - two motifs in Ramos's film that designate the fate of
its tragic hero.
Melvil Poupaud is probably the last person you would expect to see
headlining an erotic comedy in a cassock, and yet his presence as the
over-libidinous lead in Ramos's film is what gives it such dramatic
power and poignancy. After his close encounter with Madame
Guillotine (ironically the result of losing his head with another
woman), Poupaud's priest introduces himself to us as an affable soul
whose only aim in life is to make people happy - especially
well-endowed young women who share his devotion to the pleasures of the
flesh. There's a seductively hypnotic quality to Poupaud's
mellifluous narration that makes the beatific priest look far more like
a saint than a sinner as he indulges in his peculiar form of worship, a
man transfigured by desires sated and anticipated in his lush Garden of
Eden.
But, as anyone who has ever read or heard the
Book of Genesis knows,
the man who eats the forbidden fruit is sure to be ejected from
paradise before he has even had the chance to spit out the pips.
The priest's fall is as sudden as it is ignominious, and when it
begins, with the shock discovery that he has made one of his divine
playthings pregnant, the mood of the film changes abruptly. The
comedy is over and the tragedy is soon in full throttle, with the
priest succumbing to a form of insanity that will ultimately make a
monster of him and lead him to commit an act of the utmost
vileness. This is where Poupaud's acting prowess comes in
to its own. The transition from loveable hedonist to murdering
fiend is so convincingly and so seamlessly accomplished by the actor
that you continue to sympathise with him even when he has passed the
point of no return.
Poupaud's priest is a man with two sides that reflect the duality
inherent in us all - Ramos implies as much at the start of the film by
having him sliced in two by a guillotine blade. This split
personality is shared by the film itself which adopts a two-part
structure, with an abrupt tonal shift that marks the start of the
priest's descent into Hell. The two halves of the film resemble
two sides of diptych painting - of the sort that may be attributed to
Hieronymous Bosch, with the delights of an earthly paradise on one side
set against the demonic torments of Hell on the other. In the
midst of insanity, Poupaud's priest is no more wicked than he was
before his fall. We do not see him as monster, but merely as a
tragic victim of those cosmic forces that delight in making us humans
miserable. His ultimate act of desecration is sickening, but even
in this we are moved to pity him and see the greater injustice that
lies behind it. Philippe Ramos's light and dark parable on human
frailty ought to provoke intense revulsion, but strangely it
doesn't. It's a singular work that engages our sympathies
and indulges our pleasures, reminding us as it does so that, contrary to what William Blake would have us believe,
every one of us is destined to have our share of sweet delight and
endless night.
© James Travers 2015
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
In 1959, a young Catholic priest takes up his new position in an
idyllic rural community and soon makes himself the most popular man in
the area. Not content with saving his parishioners' souls, he
occupies himself with their social activities, creating a football club
for the village's youngsters and organising amateur dramatics for the
more theatrically minded. His greatest pleasure he reserves for
himself, seducing the female members of his parish and indulging in his
wild erotic fantasies. Is it not his duty, as a man of God, to
worship his creator's handiwork and derive from it the fullest
satisfaction? The priest's earthly joys are crowned on the day
that a beautiful blind girl named Rose gives herself to him in body and
soul. The sweet fruits of paradise soon turn sour when Rose
reveals she is pregnant. A morbid terror of what will now ensue
drives the priest to commit a terrible act and he will lose his head
in more ways than one...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.