La vie nouvelle

You'd be hard put to find rubbish more noxious than Grandrieux's LA VIE NOUVELLE (NEW LIFE) in a dozen metal cannister's at the local dump.

I like stuff that experiments, but I despise stuff that experiments with nothing on its mind -- or certainly nothing that the director is capable of communicating.

Essentially, it's the tiresome story of a pimp wanting to own and abuse a hooker. In some camps, that simple synopsis might sound promising, but you'll be retreating fast once you see said synopsis executed (poorly).

We get long, disconnected, blurred images, a wanky soundtrack, actors moping, sex scenes that are boring and interminable and nude girls who'd be better off clothed.

This flick was recommended to me by the head of a major international film festival who thought it was right up my alley. I'm insulted that he'd think I'd buy this trash.

Staying to the end of the screening took iron discipline and now I want my two hours back.

Nauseaus.

Premiered in 2002, Philippe Grandrieux's controversial second feature film La Vie Nouvelle opens a new type of experimentation with form while at the same time challenging the viewer's tolerance. This film is not used as a means to reflect, but a device probing deeply into the desires and states of mind of the characters. Grandrieux's usual styles - shaky images, techno music, and impulsive camera position (for viewers to approximate the characters' complex and intense emotions) remain. Sex scenes are often shown in darkness and even infra-red, leading the viewer to ponder upon the suggested but unseen violence.

Contrary to the forward-looking title, the new life is a bleak one. At a brothel-like hotel in an East European city, the young American soldier Seymour (Zach Knighton) encounters and becomes obsessed with the prostitute Mélania (Anna Mouglalis). After an initiatory traumatic hair cutting scene, the human trafficker Boyan transforms Mélania into a commodity (she is carried around like a piece of weightless luggage). In this degraded urban space, men's bestiality merges with that of dogs. It is the disfigured bodies and gestures, instead of usual conversation or screams, that depicts the horror. The sensitive Seymour eventually attempts to purchase Mélania outright. Signing a pact with Mélania's infamous master, Seymour is left with a handsome price to pay.

This is a love it or hate it auteur film about control, evilness, objectified bodies, internalised fear, and extreme cinematic expression, with morally-suspect moments bound by Grandrieux's highly perceptive vision and atmospheric images.

Grandrieux's 'la Vie Nouvelle' explores one man's obsession and fall into a base and instinctive human. With extraordinary visual flair Grandrieux introduces us to an un-named war torn Eastern European city where Zachary Knighton's soldier on leave falls for a 'dancer' in a sleazy club.

With sparse dialogue and complex narrative we understand the complexities of the soldier's feelings, his love of his closest friend and the simplicity of morals in a city razed to concrete. Grandrieux approach to his camera work and sound design forces you to become involved in the characters, he brings us close to their emotional point of view never allowing us too far back form the action. Indeed at times we are so intimately close to the characters' mindset that it can be hard to not turn away in horror.

indeed, whilst this film is in some ways 'another European art-house film...' it could also be classified as a film in the horror genre, the final sequence involving the soldier's friends is shocking and violent.

This is an important film from a director with plenty to say and who is clearly bold enough to say it differently and with considerable force.

see this film

Calling this film pretensious might be easy for someone not quite interested in the exploration Grandieux essays here. This film is more an essay than it is a conventional narrative. Praising it as boundary-breaking is also easy enough. The conflict between commercial features and artistic oriented films is there before this film and structures most of the reactions one will get from people who have watched it. This is as groundbreaking as a good narrative can be, it all depends on where your inclinations linger. But despite that, this film has some wonderfully achieved aesthetic gems. As for the plot, it's all about ambiguity and undefinition. It's about violence and lack of familiar bonds. All the exchanges between characters are troubled and not actual exchanges, power relations maybe. People are lost between sex and impotence, necessity and compulsion. Although there is no familiarity, there is an intense sexually ambiguous intimacy. It tries to suffocate you and in my opinion it is too deliberate in it, it tries to manipulate you through sound and frantic camera motion, taking it as far as to declare itself overtly ostentatious. It's excess. No problem there. I didn't find it a masterpiece. I won't say it isn't worth the look either. It's surely a quest for his own style on the part of Grandieux!

This is a film that provokes strong reactions, usually negative ones. But then that's always been the privilege of the avant-garde. Grandrieux has stripped away almost all story, dialogue, character, and motivation - except for the darkest psychosexual impulses. This film is about those impulses in the most direct possible way - it immerses us in them directly and relentlessly. Not through character and story, but directly through the audiovisual plane. He refuses to leaven or soften the experience by giving us any character we can identify with; and this is surely the point: it's a film that directly mimics the point where humans become animals, at the mercy of their basest impulses. Impossible to overcome them. This is made clear by the repeated images of wild dogs, etc. The film may both repel and bore viewers with this insistence. But there is no denying that Grandrieux is a remarkably original director in his use of image and sound. It's worth knowing that his background is in video art. The film positively swelters inside a thick womblike soundtrack of buzzing, throbbing noise; the camera sears depraved, repetitive images on our eyeballs. The film seems to exist outside time and place - some sort of east european setting is the only clue we have to whereabouts. It feels more like a circle of hell than anywhere on earth. And that's precisely the point.