Themroc (1973)

 

Director: Claude Faraldo

Screenplay: Claude Faraldo

Cast: Michel Piccoli as Themroc, Béatrice Romand as the Sister of Themroc, Marilù Tolo as the Secretary, Francesca Romana Coluzzi as the Female Neighbour, Jeanne Herviale as the Mother, Patrick Dewaere as the Police Officer, Coluche as Male Neighbour, Miou-Miou as the Young Neighbour

An Abstract Candidate

 

Themroc has an interesting legacy in Britain, though one interlaced with a time of moral panics. Channel 4 in Britain, when it was first launched in 1982, was literally the fourth terrestrial television station in Britain. Television was dominated in my country by the BBC, who had two stations, and ITV, who was originally a series of regional stations that shared programming and had advertising unlike the BBC. Channel 4 would eventually over the decades become more conventional, but at first they were very controversial, an alternative choice even into the nineties and into the Millennium as, even when they were drawing bigger numbers creating shows which could get complaints. They had a few notorious moments over the decades, be it satirist Chris Morris' incredibly controversial Brass Eye (1997), which tackled biting topics like the fear of paedophilia in the media with a scathing surrealism, to even TFI Friday, a live music comedy show hosted by Chris Evans originally between 1996 and 2000, which had its own controversies to the point Happy Mondays frontman Shaun Ryder was not allowed on the show in live form to get around his passive habit for cursing. Even now, toning down, you still get something like Naked Attraction, started in 2016, which is a dating show where you literally first get to know someone from their naked body first before their face or personality, which got the danders up for some¹ and thankfully shows that old school side to them.

Themroc is important for them as, whilst only a series with ten films², Channel 4 showed Claude Faraldo's experimental satire as the first film for the Red Triangle series between 1986-7, a curated series of international and experimental films which were marked as after midnight broadcasts, warned in their promotion as having adult content. This was a literal red triangle promising adult material, with many of the choices having sexually explicit content even if they were cerebral works, like Michelangelo Antonioni's sexually explicit but ennui drenched Identification of a Woman (1982). Some films were not this, like the devastating Brazilian film Pixote (1981), films which have slowly been rediscovered and some, like the two from Japanese filmmaker Shūji Terayama in the line-up, in dire need of actual releases in the West still. Themroc among them is the entry from the French industry after the French New Wave, least the time after Jean-Luc Godard proclaimed the medium dead and made experimental projects in a variety of forms over the seventies, a time which could give you Jacques Rivette's Out 1 (1971), but also Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973), a project by the Situationist movement which took a martial arts film, and added a new dub which was a left wing political satire intermingled with the fight scenes. 

Themroc immediately stands out as entirely wordless or depicted with the cast speaking complete gibberish, a tale of art house film legend Michel Piccoli as an ordinary working Joe who ends up descending into an urban caveman after one bad day at work after being disciplined for eyeing in on his boss and his sexy secretary. The film depicts this all in his performance, the cast and the world without needing dialogue, and one of its first idiosyncratic touches tells his back story by repeating each day of this dead end job through tiny moments from days pass, the same moments but with the cast in different clothes per day of Piccoli's life. Among the things which influences this character's descent is also with the opposite gender and sex. Thankfully, this does not factor in with a way which could horribly date as this progression goes on; even if he commits to an incestuous relationship with his sister (Béatrice Romand), this feels like a perverse touch even if a discomforting one, one of the first stabs at the taboos this film is playing with than a male fantasy. It is certainly an eccentric production, where a very sick sense of humour goes a long way into appreciating this, and a sense of the weird too, witnessing the likes of the guard obsessed with sharpening pencils only to break the tips so he can sharpen them again, not that dissimilar to the man polishing his posh car over and over living in the same apartment complex as our lead when the events transpire, strange irrational behaviour between with hindsight that make Piccoli's turn, even if transgressive, more sane in comparison. Cemented together by Piccoli himself, in primal scream form in a damn good performance, he is not playing a troglodyte stereotype but this force of confidence in urban form. This is one or two aspects which may have aged, but not in the ways expected, in that he does begin to entice the women around him, including the secretary, with his charms, but it becomes more complicated. Far more likely to have aged, just in the incestuous relationship, is how Béatrice Romand is a much younger woman in various states of undress throughout the film rather than them being siblings, all because the transgression is more clearly the point but the presentation is what is closer to the reductive alternative version what could have gotten in Themroc as a bad film. A lot has surprisingly gained more as time passed for the production. The first person to follow his charge is the best example of this, as it is a  housewife played by Francesca Romana Coluzzi, a statuesque figure who escapes her doldrums and whose less dominant, small nerdy husband joins her more cautiously, with a regular hammer to break their possessions and walls down next to her with a sledgehammer.

Literally building a cave out of his apartment with a few adjustments, the production getting access to an old building complex they could literally destroy the outer walls of in real time, the police do come for Piccoli, only to become figures in a farce where tear gas is an aphrodisiac when you turn feral. Tellingly, post May 1968 and the riots which brought France to a close, it is the police who are the real monsters, a bumbling mass who for the sake of it assault a young boy out of frustration or even commit sexual assault, coming off as clueless and lost entities are mindlessness. That or as food, as authority figures become the antelopes for urban lions to barbecue for tribal bonding over a meal, with the act of cooking authority the most overtly surreal and transgressive moment, and not even hiding the meaning in subtext. There is even a hint of bisexual cavemen, or at least toying with male-male eroticism where, in an attempt to bring back human respectability by bricking the cave up with walls again, men can show sensual respect for their own beauty by stroking each other, especially to tempt them from being a mindless brick layer for authority and to join this cave person tribe.

The ending furthers this subversive streak of how Piccoli and the others are not regressing but stripping away the horrors of modernity, contrasting their few transgressions against greater horrors as the buildings allowed to be destroyed for this film's production are later contrasted by the new apartment complexes shown at the end, white fortresses which look depressing even shot from afar. Sexuality itself is part of this as is control; there is one police officer living in the apartment complexes as this all transpires who keeps his daughter under his thumb, even striking her out of discipline, regardless of her own freedoms and passions in vicinity to these events. That or the older woman, Piccoli's mother, almost having a constant panic attack between her horror at what has happened but also, even if a taboo is involved, the attack of her social morals clashing within something primordial. That there are taboos that, in any other circumstance, would rightly be considered unacceptable is understandable to consider, but Themroc clearly has these hypothetical scenarios not to suggest they are the right way forwards, like cannibalism, but as a deliberately shock.

Whilst that might be the aspect which has aged the most, the sight of values being raged and challenged in this has not, as Piccoli and his tribe manage to live in peace baring the killed and eaten police officers. His tribe's primal screams in the finale, starting to affect others across the city, cause these figures to question themselves, to break from a repetition, break from materialism by means of destroying one's car they were obsessed with, becoming part of this hymn to a singular human form of passion and life without the trappings of mindless social structure and repression. Again, all of this is conveyed without dialogue and explicit political grandstanding, and that becomes one of the best aspects of Themroc, how pure gibberish from the cast and using performance even from the non-feral figures conveys this all perfectly. Even that it manages to move away from potentially contentious aspects, the strong macho lead who woos women with his feral charms, to become much more interesting in the turns it takes with other characters means it never becomes trite and obvious.

Hilariously, it was the government of Margaret Thatcher who are to be thanked for Channel 4; a deeply controversial figure, a scourge to many and also connected to the attempts to ban "Video Nasties" in the video tape rental stores too through members of her government, they nonetheless wanted to force competition against the BBC, creating an entrepreneurial setup allowing smaller television production companies to create programming the channel could buy off them³. This ended up creating a channel that, in this original form, was everything her conservative ideals would have been aghast with, showing a film like Themroc which rebels at everything her government's ideals would have aspired to just in terms of materialism and family values. That in itself adds a delicious layer to the story, even if this screening happened before I was born, in terms of this film with a legend just in terms of British television.

Abstract Spectrum: Transgressive

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

 

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1) Naked Attraction won’t be laid bare by Ofcom as Channel 4 show escapes investigation, written by Kirsty Bosley and published for Metro.co.uk on August 7th 2017.

2) Too hot for TV? Inside Channel 4’s doomed Red Triangle experiment, written by Stephen Armstrong and published for The Telegraph July 14th 2021.

3) I owe Margaret Thatcher a debt of thanks for creating Channel 4. Now her heirs could destroy it, written by David Olusoga and published by The Guardian on July 25th 2021.