Saturday 27 February 2016

Two Or Three Things I Know About Her (1967)

From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/post_images/
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Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Catherine Vimenet and Jean-Luc Godard
Cast: Marina Vlady (as Juliette Jeanson); Roger Montsoret (as Robert Jeanson); Anny Duperey (as Marianne); Raoul Lévy (as John Bogus, the American); Jean Narboni (as Roger); Juliet Berto (as Girl talking to Robert); Christophe Bourseiller (as Christophe Jeanson)

Synopsis: For over eighty five minutes Jean-Luc Godard depicts the cultural climate of Paris and France in 1967, following a housewife, Marina Vlady (Jeanson), who has to moonlight as a prostitute for additional income. Following primarily women who cross Marina's path, an unseen narrator voiced by Godard himself assesses how language has changed, in brightly coloured scenes, now advertising and magazines exist.

After years of transitioning from viewing Jean-Luc Godard as an overrated director for me to being a highly admirable one I hold highly, a huge point to make from my perspective after having to work hard viewing his films originally is that it's not a good idea to try to explain every theme, quotation and image in a single Godard film in terms of having a single, complete connection and meaning, as if they are solidified quantities in only one form. Godard not so long after starting his career, at beginning with Contempt (1963), decided to make his films even if they had plots hung over them the cinematic equivalents of his personal journals; the quotations and techniques meant to interconnect with every other one in the films but, like a stream of consciousness if you wrote whatever came to mind in a diary, his work gladly jumps to each one by what felt appropriate for the mood at the moment of each scene. When he claimed cinema was dead with Week End (1967), and went onto the Dziga Vertov group and then onto the video made essay work with his future collaborator and life partner Anne-Marie Miéville, not even his "second debut" Slow Motion (1980) would be like the films he made before as he continued diving further into the deep end of his style, refusing to come back.

From http://designobserver.com/media/images/Two_or_Three_Things1.jpg
In depicting the life of a wife, happy in her life with two children but working on the side as a prostitute, over a small span of time, Godard is able to weave in the many things that exist within her timeframe, the clothes shops and cafes in their colourful details to the words found on both billboards and spoken aloud by people around her. The Vietnam war is looming over the film, as if the state of France at the time which Godard is heavily critical of in his narration.  With Two Or Three Things I Know About Her, like Godard's other work, a huge factor with viewing them is continually having to absorb materials and ideas that are thrown in rapid quantities every minute. A lot has to be absorbed in his films, and baring the time dated content of France at the point this film was released, a year before the May 1968 riots that shock the country, Godard wanted to tackle the state of modern society in full detail in only a very short length. He does however sum the film's point early on, helping the viewer, when a character says language is a house people live in. Language and its use, and misuse, is a huge theme for his work that would continue onwards, the barrage of visual and audio stimuli in his films at this point in his career as much a permanent, ongoing obsession with the vagueness of language, culminating decades later by the time of Film Socialisme (2010)  reduced to a YouTube clip of two kittens making noises as if they're talking to each other in the middle of a work saturated in language.

From http://deeperintomovies.net/journal/image14/23things6.jpg
Parodies of Godard's filmmaking style and French art cinema eventually fail when you go beyond his obsession with shooting actors speaking obtuse proclamations whilst smoking, as from the moment he used jump cuts in his debut, originally seen as mistakes due to bad editing, he discovered how to manipulate everything within a film and what made such a film in creation. He could even manipulate the opening and ending credits - finding words in the middle of others, playing with their colour and font - and took a swan dive into using anything visual or audio related, everything with a film itself, in his work to explain his views and how language could be distorted.  (A testament to this is that his last film in his eighties, Goodbye to Language (2014)  was made in 3D with a camera he had built personally to be able to do so). As a result of this, not only does this film still have relevant moments to the current day, the level of visual stimuli in billboards and advertisements worse with the internet, but his almost pop-art colours and inventiveness help were the ideas may be difficult to understand clearly on a first viewing, the depth of the little games he plays expansive. Allusions in allusions, double meanings and references, a break taking and prolonged sequence with the bubbles in a black coffee becoming like stars in a galaxy, as Godard as the narrator admits language has become vague and difficult for himself to use, next to moments that are clearly absurd and humorous such as the man who checks the water meter appearing when the female occupant is in the bath.

From http://www.unsungfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/
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Technical Details:
The scope in how much Godard manipulates his film texture could compile a whole book just to chronicle this single film. Important for this film thought particularly is editing, particularly as within the content of each scene being depicted he is careful to make every detail, every passing comment made by a bystander stand out, all coming together for the theme of a very consumerist world. Moments when he lets the camera slow move across a scene without the heavy editing, such as a scene when Juliette takes her daughter to day care, allow both the film to breathe but still have a lot of details in the background to pay attention to too.

After his debut Breathless (1960), a scrappy and energised work where the tracking camera shots were memorably created by using a wheelchair the crew got hold of, Godard would take advantage of how he became successful and had access to what Orson Welles called the "giant train set" in the type of technical quality he had at hand by using everything from the CinemaScope lens to the colour to a greater end than with other directors. The dynamic nature of his films, particularly when they get to the colour entries, have a greater pop than a lot of his contemporaries, paradoxically the most esoteric director of the French New Wave besides Jacques Rivette also being the most colourful and playful of many in terms of how energetic he could be. A reason why I grew to admire Godard eventually, which you see in this film through its ability to pack so much into its short length, is how he is able to convey a message both concisely but offer multiple meanings in one image or statement within a single moment.

From https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3570/3798000394_3c1bec6d3e.jpg
Abstract Spectrum: Experimental/Expressionist
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High
Godard managed to make films entirely of his own genre, Godardian, but it depends on which particularly films which are the most "Godardian" of the lot. Détective (1985) [Reviewed Here] was a narrative feature which was still primarily influenced by its plot despite its many tangents. Week End on the other hand, even though it has a narrative thread, takes its lead from Alice In Wonderland and entirely throws its protagonists into an extreme direction, a series of jokes, political provocations and absurdities that wash over the viewer forcing them to follow its logic completely. With Two Or Three Things I Know About Her, while a later work like Film Socialisme would take its structure and style further, the older film from the sixties is still completely unpredictable in how it manipulates and changes directions in what it does, its theme of language and popular culture filtered through the many issues and mediums that were there at the time; aptly, shots of two men behind a giant pile of books, one of them recording down a random paragraph the other reads from various types of literature to make one text, is an appropriate metaphor for the film around the duo  as a whole, the scramble of tones and words around the characters shown in unfiltered form with Godard himself trying to make sense of it for himself as much as for the viewer.

It is a film where a random female bystander, one of many, can suddenly talk directly to the camera about her life, forcing the viewer to engage with her about her life, where an incredibly young Juliet Berto can suddenly appear in a cameo scene as well as if a prequel to her character in Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974). Bertolt Brecht is immediately quoted in the opening and Godard already undermines the forth wall soon after this when the narrator introduces the female protagonist played by Jeanson twice as two people and describes head movements that he later says are pointless to inform the viewer about. For Godard, in the early beginnings of his career, there was already a disregard with conventions about what tone and style in conventional filmmaking should be, leading to films like this one which he would build upon throughout the decades after.  

From https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2489/3798002994_bb2610490a.jpg
Personal Opinion:
A difficult film, one I don't recommend as the first Godard you see, but the rush of invention once you get used to his style makes it certainly one of the most memorable. Personally I find Breathless, his most known film, to be pretty inadequate and lacking in comparison to what he would make onwards, a debut that Godard would drastically improve upon when he could manipulate everything seen and heard onscreen. Now that I can appreciate the director's work I anticipate viewing a Godard film I've never seen before because nearly every one of them, including shorts without any subtitles, are going to bring something unique in how they are made and, importantly, in the ideas and content within them. As he's dissected politics over the years in films like Two Or Three Things I Know About Her, he's done more with cinema in one film compared to a handful from other directors in terms of invention and scope, and that he has made many films of this quality is an even more impressive feat. 

Wednesday 17 February 2016

1000 Anime Crossover: January 2016

From https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-qGLS6IF2OIA/ThKammPmh4I/
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#15: Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011)
Director: Akiyuki Shinbo
Screenplay: Gen Urobuchi
Voice Cast: Aoi Yūki (as Madoka Kaname); Chiwa Saito (as Homura Akemi); Emiri Katō (as Kyubey); Ai Nonaka (as Kyōko Sakura); Eri Kitamura (as Sayaka Miki); Kaori Mizuhashi as Mami Tomoe and Tatsuya Kaname)

Abstract Spectrum: Fantastique/Surreal
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Finally seeing the series that caught people by surprise, taking the magical girl trope into darker and more existential territory, it doesn't matter in this case that it's not an abstract work at all. It does have some very unconventional and inspired ideas aesthetically which have importance in telling the story and adding to the emotional content, especially the surrealistic edge of having the monsters of the show based on innocent, childish motifs such as food or the circus. Unbelievably grim, I don't recommend watching Madoka in a  low mood, but after hearing about the show over five years the surprising emotional punch I had from it will be one of the best things of 2016 in terms of first viewings.

For my full view, follow the link HERE.

From http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/galerians/images/b/b2/
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#16: Galerians: Rion (2002)
Director: Masahiko Maesawa
Screenplay: Chinfa Kan
Voice Cast: Akira Ishida (as Rion); Shiho Kikuchi (as Lilia); Akira Ishida (as Cain); Kenichi Suzumura (as Rainheart); Ryoko Kinomiya (as Dorothy); Takehito Koyasu (as Birdman); Yuka Imai (as Rita)

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
One of the last early 3D anime before Shinji Aramaki's Appleseed (2004) brought up the quality visually of this sort of thing and it became more common - just from Aramaki deciding everything he would make afterwards would be 3D animation - Rion is certainly a forgotten oddity, a videogame adaptation that does suffer from its visual and storytelling limitations. The most compelling thing about the anime is this struggle, although it does have the strange back-story of its Western DVD release including an alternative soundtrack including Slipknot and Mudvayne, thus bringing back memories from my childhood without having even listening to that alternative version.

For my full view, follow the link HERE.

From https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original
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#17: You're Under Arrest! - The Motion Picture (1999)
Director: Junji Nishimura
Screenplay: Masashi Sogo and Seiji Soga
Voice Cast: Akiko Hiramatsu (as Miyuki Kobayakawa); Sakiko Tamagawa (as Natsumi Tsujimoto); Bin Shimada (as Ken Nakajima); Etsuko Kozakura (as Yoriko Nikaido); Ikuya Sawaki (as Inspector Tokuno); Issei Masamune (as Chief)

Abstract Spectrum: None
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
After being introduced to this popular franchise through two terrible anime spin-offs, this was a better way to get into a long running series by way of a beautifully anime, fun action comedy that never gets bogged down by its more serious plot but never becomes mediocre fluff.

For my full view, follow the link HERE.

Tuesday 16 February 2016

Hot Love (1985)

From http://www.joergbuttgereit.com/
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Director: Jorg Buttgereit
Screenplay: Jorg Buttgereit
Cast: Jörg Buttgereit, Norbert Hähnel, Marion Koob-Liebing, Patricia Leipold, Bernd Daktari Lorenz

Synopsis: A man falls in love with a woman, only for her to start a romance with another man and break his heart to an irreparable degree. Pregnant, the woman's child nine months later from this event will be a personification of the scorned love at its most extreme.



The short film Buttgereit made before Nekromantik (1987), it does reflect the enthusiasm of genre and horror film fans who would make their own films in response to this passion. In the eighties this proved to be a mine for directors who would develop cult reputations and even go to Hollywood - The Evil Dead (1981) for Sam Raimi and Bad Taste (1987) for Peter Jackson perfect examples, whilst Nekromantik for Buttgereit himself gave him notoriety and a cult following to this day. The enthusiasm is enhanced in these particular films, from this era, by the desire to improve in technical skill and push what they could do in terms of ideas they could put onscreen, and while Hot Love is less polished than Nekromantik, it already establishes a desire for invention not to mention Buttgereit's far from conventional use of genre tropes by wrapping them around  a drama. As Nekromantik is actually a black comedy drama about a man obsessed with death, Hot Love is the depiction of a relationship breaking down exaggerated to its gooiest point.

It starts as a sweet romantic affair between two people, complimented by a montage of a relationship building up you'd find in Hollywood films of the era and still today, only for an ominous voice of a God-like force to speak in second person and reveal that the relationship will be doomed. That Buttgereit decided to make a short film like this, when the short he made a year before Horror Heaven was a compilation of horror and kaiju film tributes that embraced their lo-fi effects, showed an interesting side of Buttgereit wanting to bring potentially personal and idiosyncratic material to his work. It immediately brings out a lot of virtue in Hot Love, as it plays out as a melodrama for half its length, going as far as having the second boyfriend admit to a doctor with awkwardness the child isn't his, only to switch tone soon after in a graphic suicide. That it turns into a splatter film is not a jarring change in tone; it's reminiscent of the films of the Kuchar Brothers and Jack Smith from the sixties and seventies, which were melodramatic works that could suddenly surge into content from x-rated b-movies out of the blue. The different is that in Hot Blood you get something out of a Japanese body horror film from this era, a toy baby spewing foam and someone getting stabbed with a broken bottle.

Technical Detail:
Part of its charm is the improvisation that was used in lieu to obvious budget restrictions, such as the decision to depict the birth of a child with the spread open bottom half of a woman being made of paper-mache, a toy baby pushed between the fake legs with what appears to be oat meal pasted onto it. This improvisation is as much the reason why films of its ilk can be so entertaining. Also significant is the music, which is a memorable part of Hot Love as a short. This as well would continue on in the next Buttgereit project and is a huge virtue of Nekromantik.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Psychotronic
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
The one disappointment with Hot Love is that, unlike Nekromantik, it's pretty straightforward in tone and couldn't be added to the Abstract List. The events in the short escalate to an unconventional tone, especially when a grown man grows from a place they shouldn't, covered in solid goo, and starts rampaging about, but it isn't weird enough.

Personal Opinion:
To have access to Hot Love, on the UK Nekromantik Blu-Ray, is a good thing. While it may seem unsubstantial compared to the later feature film, it wins you over with its original slant on its subject and avoiding becoming predictable or sloppy in its creation. It's a reminder of the joys of fan made films whilst its moments of seriousness do catch you unexpectedly.

From http://41.media.tumblr.com/be160b28c22c1bd4e30caf3f5b5e701e/
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Friday 12 February 2016

Valhalla Rising (2009)

From http://www.juansky.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10
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Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Screenplay: Nicolas Winding Refn, Roy Jacobsen
Cast: Mads Mikkelsen (as One-Eye); Maarten Stevenson (as The Boy); Ewan Stewart (as The General); Gary Lewis (as The Priest); Alexander Morton (as The Chieftain); Jamie Sives (as The Son)

Synopsis: In ancient Britain, when the Vikings are being driven into the wilderness by the growing followers of Christianity, such a group of Christian warriors encounter the mute, hulking man named One-Eye (Mikkelsen), an escaped fighter for a pagan tribe who with a young boy join the warriors on a boat trip to take back Jerusalem. Able to see into the future, One-Eye is aware of the doom they are all drifting towards, starting with their way on the ocean being completely blinded by fog...

Nicolas Winding Refn is a curious modern day auteur, one I have not ever given a decisive opinion on but in hindsight to this review may grow more and more respect for finally. To give you the interest the man offers in his filmography, another film that could be covered in the future was the one that sabotaged his first attempt to conquer American due it's sad failure commercially,  Fear X (2003) with John Turturro and music by Brian Eno, blatantly in debt to David Lynch to a possible flaw but an elusive creation that showed a unique filmmaking vision. His success, from the Pusher trilogy to Drive (2011), alongside his rollercoaster of a career, where after licking his wounds from the Fear X experience he even directed a Miss Marple one-off, makes him a fascinating character and his filmography itself is the same, continually subverting and playing with genre cinema in unpredictable ways. Out of what I've seen, if he becomes a great director for me it's not going to be because of his most well known film Drive, which feels generic compared to a filmography that includes the controversial follow-up Only God Forgives (2013), his unconventional biopic Bronson (2008) and Valhalla Rising itself.

From https://demonsresume.files.wordpress.com/2011/09
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An incredibly low budget mythical film whose surface appearance is that of a Viking movie, Valhalla Rising as it starts drastically contrasts from this with its minimalist tone. It takes on the nose with pride its artistic aspirations and pretensions. A film shot in the massive, full landscapes of Scotland but contrasted by the claustrophobic close-ups used for most shots of the actors. A spiritual journey to Hell but rather than Dante's Inferno it's a very small cast walking amongst mud sodden fields, the excessive violence of many of Refn's films contrasted here by an emphasis more on mood to dictate the narrative, the story told in many places through visuals only. Only Only God Forgives may have taken this film's tone fully rather than the others which change things around. Completely mute in the role of One-Eye, Mikkelsen as a living personification of brutality is also a soothsayer, his prophecies blood red flashes hazy at first to understand but ominous of what will come, Mikkelsen conveying as much as possible through only his body language as the dialogue spoken by everyone else is nearly obtuse, concise dialogue adding to the unnerving tension that seeps more and more into the film as the narrative goes along. The result is an art house genre film but the mixing of the genre qualities and the tones defined stereotypically as "art house" creates a blurred line between the two into uncharted territory. The vibe of the film's tone is comparable to Apocalypse Now (1979), where as the natives are completely unseen but completely threatening, the warriors fall apart and most of them go insane, reducing them less to holy warriors but scared animals.

From https://ajaylee.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/valhalla03-big.jpg
One fact that shouldn't be ignored is the subplot of Christianity; set in the era where Christianity would eventually drive away the pagan religions, its yet fraught with conflict as the Christian warriors become disillusioned and broken down just from the prolonged, agonising boat trip in the centre of the film, fog blinding their way and undrinkable seawater all around them as they slowly go mad. As one suggests the young boy who tags along with One-Eye is responsible for the fog and should be killed, it's not said accusing the boy of being a demon or witchcraft being involved but in the tone of a superstitious pagan, the deconstruction and collapse of the Christian groups taking place as One-Eye stays back and only has to be involved if someone threatens him or the boy. Barring the few glimpses of giant crosses, the Christians are still new, still part of the old tribes as they're first seen with a group of completely naked women who've clearly been captured from warring with Vikings, the Christian cause to liberate the Holy Land of Jerusalem less the desire to preserve the message of peace in Christ's sacrifice for humanity but territorial. This could be seen as cheap, anti-Christian rhetoric but it should be remembered that Refn is Scandinavian, from the region where the Vikings would be his real ancestors and Christianity despite its later dominance still a foreign influence on the land as it would on Britain with its Celtic heritage. Subconsciously, even if it's by coincidence, the contradictory states of mysticism and religion without fully evoking them is central to the film, all boiled down to the only clear minded person, without doubt or conflict, being the mute beast of a man who can gladly go to his doom willingly and breaks peoples necks with the chain he's attached to.

From http://40.media.tumblr.com/3579755ca82a2815a844222efa5198a5
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Technical Details:
A very low budget production, made around the time of Bronson, the small cast is dwarfed by locations which fill in the grandness required for the tone to work. Britain, bearing in mind my bias as a native, has incredible outdoor environments. Because of the visual age of such landscapes, you can still feel the history and mythology that has soaked into the rock faces, where the backbone of paganism and British mysticism can be felt and adds to the atmosphere of a film instantly if shot properly on camera. Even under grey skies, with the right mindset they can be powerful and vast in their scale and distance. Even when the Scottish locations masquerade for the landscape the group get to by boat, the advantage taken by the cinematography using them sets the methodical tone required perfectly.

The music by Peter Peter and Peter Kyed only gets to the post-metal guitars and tribal drumming you'd expect from a modern Viking film by the final act, but in general alongside the emphasis on visuals only, depriving viewers of obvious plot explanation, the music generates the needed emotional tone that the mere images may not have by themselves. When the score finally explodes into its most bombastic part its epic.

From https://maql74.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/valhalla-rising.png
Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist/Mindbending/Psychotronic
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium
With clear influence from Werner Herzog and Terence Malick, Valhalla Rising nonetheless is its own film, the violent gore contrasting immensely from the minimalistic presentation. Its economic in this area which adds to its elliptic tone, the minimal adding to its unconventional tone as one is forced to experience the story from the characters' perspective rather than as an outside viewer. As the madness that inflicts the group takes place the film takes on a more editing heavy, chaotic tone when the unforeseen enemy appears and eyes are watching off-screen at the warriors. Because of the presentation the sense of building dread is pervasive and increases throughout the film, culminating into a finale that leaves the end on a sombre note.

From https://shutupandwatchthemovie.files.wordpress.com/
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Personal Opinion:
It has been six or so years since viewing Valhalla Rising for the first time, and it's still as dynamic and impactful since that last time. While openly, brazenly, artistic it never becomes hollow and attempting to decorate itself in such art house tropes, making sure that everything done onscreen and in presentation is meant to build up the tensions felt by the characters. It's not a traditional Viking film, which would've disappointed some, but instead it's an incredibly alien experience like many of Refn's films.

Friday 5 February 2016

Baby Blood (1990)

From https://www.talkinfrench.com/wp-content
/uploads/2014/10/Baby-Blood-1990.jpg
Director: Alain Robak
Screenplay: Alain Robak and Serge Cukier
Cast: Emmanuelle Escourrou (as Yanka); Christian Sinniger (as Lohman); Jean-François Gallotte (as Richard); Roselyne Geslot (as Rosette)

Synopsis: At a circus, a new leopard is acquired that houses a millennia old parasitic life form waiting to be born. When the leopard is unsuitable as a host, it emigrates into the womb of the pregnant Yanka (Escourrou), the wife of the circus owner whose foetus is taken over by a life form that demands human blood to grow from. Fleeing the circus and living in whatever way she can, Yanka and the life form develop a love-hate relationship with nine months ahead before she gives birth to the being.

French horror cinema before the 2000s from an ignorant outsider's point of view is a series of valleys and peaks in terms of the amount of films made in contrast to other European countries like Italy who, when they started making horror movies at a consistent rate, kept making them over decades long. Around the 2000s onwards there's a large industry for such films, but its far more inconsistent at least in terms of what is known of outside of French audiences. There are a handful of films over the decades from Jean Epstein's 1928 adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher to Eyes Without A Face (1960) and even in the largest period before the 2000s for horror movies, the late sixties and seventies, if you remove the co-productions between countries and prolific individuals like Jean Rollin there's sadly an obscurity of films written about in great detail. The wave of new French horror of the 2000s stands out because suddenly up to today a vast  sub-industry of horror films were being made in the consistency of the seventies output. Unfortunately films will have likely been left in obscurity during the period inbetween even when horror and cult film fans embrace an international palette in their cinema, Baby Blood a great example of this. I didn't know of the existence of such an interesting film until the Horror Channel in Britain gave it a chance a few years ago on the TV schedule, and it's not been on DVD let alone Blu-Ray in the UK.

From http://www.darksidereviews.com/wp-content/
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This is a shame as Baby Blood is certainly a peculiar gem. Only here could you think a film is going to turn into Andrzej Zulawski's Possession (1981), with its claustrophobic room shots and occasional prowling cameras, only to end like a French Peter Jackson splatstick film. There is a distinct earthliness, a grim realism, to the film which weaves with the more absurd gore moments that come in as Yanka's pregnancy goes through its nine months, personified by Emmanuelle Escourrou herself as Yanka. Escourrou is a very earthy, curvaceous woman, far removed from the manufactured glamour of magazines and closer to a real young woman you'd bump into in a rural French village or on the Paris streets. Exactly like Béatrice Dalle, who'd go from art cinema to horror films like Inside (2007), one of Escourrou's distinct physical traits which do add something to her prescience is her gap teeth, which do drastically change a person's face and add a great deal to her appearance between an innocent woman having to deal with the parasite in her stomach and a person willing to kill others for said parasite. The casting of ordinary men and women in the rest of the film adds a verisimilitude far removed from the stylisation most English language horror outside of seventies exploitation films. This applies to the world depicted as well, a general corporal realism to the film which balances between the naturalistic and the visceral, close-ups of uneaten sausage and beans left to mould on a plate to slime and viscera being split, the disgusting and the pretty intermingling a great deal. The only part of the film that might put people off but not for intentional aesthetic purpose is the god-awful fashion. On the cusp of the nineties, shell suits and perms populate the cast, and considering late eighties Eric Rohmer films suffered from this for their sake of realism, its merely a archival curiosity which doesn't detract from the film's style at all. Just be aware that, while it adds to the realism, this shows one of the most extreme examples of dated fashion ideals out of any horror films I've seen, the naked realism preventing a nostalgic kitsch from saving any of the clothes. In many ways it adds to the visual virtues of the film by forcing it, unintentionally, on a viewer decades later.

From http://img.rp.vhd.me/4502292_l2.jpg
The film manages to be a fascinating character study where the plight of Yanka's is sympathetic but the parasite in her body is just as interesting an individual. Voiced with an almost helium induced voice, the developing interactions between "him" and his improvised mother, to the point of moments like Yanka correcting his pronunciation of a word, makes them sympathetic together despite him being a monstrous character. That Yanka eventually treats him as her child draws out a peculiar sweetness despite him encouraging her to commit random murders to feed him. The relationship, alongside the many colourful characters they encounter, provide the film with a depth whilst the mix of the serious and blackly humorous completes the entertainment value. The air of absurdity that eventually coats the film, like two of the most unprofessional ambulance drivers I've seen in cinema ever, adds to its personality and it helps the cast around Escourrou is just as interesting as her. Director Alain Robak doesn't hold back in casting people who you'd find on the streets, distinct character faces that are instantly memorable in just a cameo for a few seconds, and likewise his grubby depiction of France where the rural countryside is off to the side of motorways is certainly a unique presentation for the central story adding to it.

From http://www.darksidereviews.com/wp-content/
uploads/2013/12/babyblood_14.jpg
Technical Detail:
A huge advantage in Baby Blood's favour is its technical quality, a visual flair as a result of its mixing of the very realistic and down-to-earth with the absurd, right down to momentary flourishes - such as a shot where Escourrou is more than likely travelling on the dolly of the camera or a cart, depicting her mental state as the tall apartment buildings behind her move past as she moves ahead without walking - which bring a viewer in further to engage with the story.  Despite the dated late eighties fashion and hairstyles, the matching of a gritty reality with bright primary colours helps the film, even grimier than something like Street Trash (1987), the stark reality of urban and rural France with bright colours because of the decor choices of the time period melding together exceptionally well.

One thing that can be compared to films like Street Trash and early Peter Jackson horror films completely are the ways the deaths are depicted. The film eventually becomes more and more ridiculous, including an unexpected amount of head trauma from improvised sources, and as a result more blackly humorous as Yanka's pregnancy goes to its final stages. The prosthetic effects used are certainly icky and memorable enough to help in this.

From http://www.darksidereviews.com/wp-content/
uploads/2013/12/babyblood_2.jpg
Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Psychotronic
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
Admittedly, while Baby Blood is a strange and macabre experience, it isn't unconventional in tone. Instead the real meat of the film is its balance between sympathy for Yanka and her baby, and the grim humour of the characters and scenarios that take place as the viscera is spilt. The tonal shifts between the serious and humorous, the aesthetic shifts between reality and exaggeration, does create something unexpected, but not one to that would qualify for the Abstract List.

From http://www.imcdb.org/i473188.jpg
Personal Opinion:
As someone who wants a fully international palette to his cult cinema, who goes out of his way to see films from all around the world out of a sincere curiosity, adding another film to the small list of French horror films I like is a great thing. Baby Blood is confident enough for there to be a visual joke about a Baby Blood 2  poster being visible at a cinema in one scene, and it can get away with it because the content is good. Very idiosyncratic in its characters' moments of existential conversation but also very prickly in its humour and very natural tone. Again it's a regret a DVD is non-existent as it would perfectly play for an audience wanting something different.