The Wild Boys (2017)

Director: Bertrand Mandico

Screenplay: Bertrand Mandico

Cast: Pauline Lorillard as Romuald; Vimala Pons as Jean-Louis; Diane Rouxel as Hubert; Anaël Snoek as Tanguy; Mathilde Warnier as Sloane; Sam Louwyck as Le Capitaine; Elina Löwensohn as Séverin(e)

Synopsis: Five boys (played by actresses Pauline Lorillard, Vimala Pons, Diane Rouxel, Anaël Snoek and Mathilde Warnie) are as extreme as you can get as delinquents - hooligans, blasphemers, lovers of literature, and "wild boys" who after raping and accidentally killing their literature teacher find themselves with a sea captain (Sam Louwyck) whose harsh behavioural punishment is contrasted by the strange island he leads his boat to. The island is a paradise with wonderous flora, but drastically changes a person physically when they stay there for a long time, something the current occupier Séverin(e) (Elina Löwensohn) can attest to.

[Spoilers Throughout]

Starting in the early 2010s, Bertrand Mandico has spend his career in short form films until The Wild Boys, now planting his idiosyncratic flag into a theatrical length feature I sincerely hope catches a lot of attention for him and allows his work to be known. He openly absorbed a lot of influences to make The Wild Boys - and research will show he'll openly discuss those influences even on little details - but he is however also his own person, one still hard for me to define but one that is very aesthetically rich, very transgressive but in a very pansexual form and, like Guy Maddin, pulls from various genres and influences openly. Unlike Maddin, the differences in his choices are themselves signs of his themes - Boro in the Box (2011), effectively his true debut was a perverse "biography" of Walerian Borowczyk, Living Still Life (2012) taking animation to its literal extreme with Elina Löwensohn (and the director himself) reanimating actual animal corpses, and The Wild Boys taking boy's own adventure storytelling but, in casting women as the boys, openly flaunting homoerotic, queer and feminised punkish sensibilities. It's like Derek Jarman's Sebastiane (1976) to find, clutch, any real tonal comparison; the punk sensibility but filtered through that similar queer slant and elegance, if to be his trademark in later features, is definitely a different attitude to Maddin if any...

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There are also the little production differences. That, for his film which takes place on the sea and eventually a strange and curious island lost in the ocean, he actually did film at Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, and merely blended the real life natural landscape into his own worldview. That and the specific blend of the materials such as the casting of the Wild Boys themselves, including a couple of noticeable actresses like Vimala Pons, who play their roles completely straight, someone like Pons throwing herself fully into the most amoral and macho of the five wild boys, whilst everyone has very idiosyncratic stylistic ticks. This gender subversion as a major stylistic choice also leads to the plot itself.

The island itself, when finally introduced is a paradise, with flora Fantastic Planet (1973) would be proud of it with its living tendrils and woman shaped bushes to have sex with. In among all the explicit sexual references, said flora consists of various sight gags such as that bush's form or the phallic buds which you can drink very white liquid from for sustenance. Its fruit, hairy and slimy, is introduced very early on and is so explicit in sexual meaning it would be absurd for me to blatantly signpost, all coupled with the fact that eating said fruit and maybe other factors causes a literal "feminisation" of the male body, turning men into women. If there is a deeper message to The Wild Boys aside from being an aesthetic feast for the eyes, wrapped in its own world and form, it's this subversion through a plot McGuffin, as happened to Dr. Séverin(e) as played by Elina Löwensohn. The former titular star of Nadja (1994), and effectively Mandico's muse, plays a Henry Morton Stanley type in a white suit who turned into a women when he stayed on the island he and the captain found; having decided to reduce the amount of war and violence into the world, he decides to "feminise" it through the island's natural resources, starting with our five miscreant boys.

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As from the beginning of Mandico's work, he's been openly transgressive; willingly push taboos which may offend some. How the boys got to this position is such a case; explicitly set in the early 20th century, so Mandico openly quotes from the streak of transgressive literature from the time as the boys, in grotesque genderless masks, accidentally kill their teacher when, having raped her in a toxic Dionysian frenzy and tied her to a horse, end up with said horse taking her off a cliff, not pulling any punches in the material from then on. Mandico however from then on takes it further to an equal opportunity mentality when, thinking they have escaped punishment and openly deciding to go with the Captain (Sam Louwyck) out of their free will, the boys learn to late his behavioural training places them his captives.

The gender subversion itself is part of this, the blurring androgyny of masculinity with breasts, the Captain not only having a map tattooed on his penis but one mere breast due to the effect of the island, and the actresses acting like boys with their short hair and costuming. Through what I have seen, Mandico is able to be very extreme but in a way that's never lurid, a fantastique streak through his films which has let him get away with his more extreme moments alongside his open desire for gender equality in the transgression. The later is a fine point that must be considered more often when dealing with transgression in cinema - it is a nuance that can drastically help a film, particularly as Mandico gives all his actresses in his films very good roles, in among equal opportunity full frontal nudity and in this particular case the best example in all cinema, of any genre, of someone's penis inexplicably falling off and having to be buried on the beach. Whilst he will offend, he offends with disregard for gender binaries.

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Tonally, the comparison to Guy Maddin is apt, although you imagine Jack Smith if he had a budget would want to make films this glamorous - the monochrome aesthetic intercut by hazy coloured sequences of neon purples, blues and other striking colours reminiscent of silent cinema aesthetic Maddin uses but with Smith's transgression and Mandico's own grit. That's strange to think, considering especially Maddin has gotten away with transgressive material throughout his own career, but as much of it is the matter of fact nature - Mandico shows nonchalantly what Maddin exaggerates with a sense of humour. Alongside the French fantastique displayed here it's definitely his trademark.

His philosophy for all this? Punk, as mentioned, feminist definitely, as the actresses are a huge factor to The Wild Boys' success in both their committed acting and the gender subversion in plot and iconography shown. As the boys, they are pretty young men but dangerous, wild energy coursing through their veins which lashes out in dangerous ways, all five with distinct personalities. The Captain adds more as a combative figure tormenting them - more perverseness with his tattooed penis but a complex trajectory as a hard, cruel man who yet loves his pet dog and is revealed to have an honourable purpose to his cruelty, even if it involves nearly strangling young boys to death with collars on a boat which can be pulled in. And Elina Löwensohn strides around like a living colossus - she, with a healthy career alongside her Hal Hartley work and newer films like this or Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's Let The Corpses Tan (2017), having roles like this one she can be proud of.

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Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Psychotronic/Transgressive/Weird

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

Personal Opinion:

From his debut, around the time of Boro in the Box, Mandico has started perfectly. Arguably a film like Boro in the Box is worthy enough to be a debut even at only forty minutes, but The Wild Boys would be a perfect way to introduce him to many, with a combination that'd appeal to both cult and art house audiences. The obvious question is whether Bertrand Mandico will ever get wider recognition, and what he will do now he's finally made a feature; the question of what a second film will be like, (and hopefully he'll make a second theatrical length film), is effected as much by what ideas he still has and what he can do as a follow on. Now I have utter admiration for him, coupled by grievance in the difficulty now in seeing his other work, it'll be interesting if he continues or if The Wild Boys is sadly a one-off.

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A Bertrand Mandico Double Bill: Boro in the Box/Living Still Life (2011/2012)

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Boro in the Box

Screenplay: Bertrand Mandico

Cast: Elina Löwensohn as Walerian Borowczyk (Voiceover) / La mère; Thierry Benoiton as Jerzy; Jacques Malnou as Grand-père; Elise Hote as Emilia; Laure Lapeyre as Olga; Benoît Serre as L'homme du train; Tom Cholat as Boro enfant; Ruben Lulek as Boro enfant; Audrey Le Corre as La muse; Mika'Ela Fisher as Ligia

Synopsis: A perverse tribute, in vignettes in alphabetical and chronological order, which tells an alternative take on the life of controversial Polish animator and director Walerian Borowczyk.

For the occasional dull quasi-art house films I've put up with, MUBI's streaming gift for the most part has been a gift that has been worth the investment. Sadly it has a thirty day time limit on films, including those you may have difficulty ever seeing again, but to bastardise a famous quote it is better to have watched a film than to never have seen it at all, and if that's the way they were able to access some of the titles they've collected, so be it a necessary evil. It's definitely the case as they've introduced me to directors I'd never heard of but fully deserve coverage as filmmakers of the abstract. One was Khavn, the punkish one-man band of Philippine cinema, now there's Bertrand Mandico from France, a French director who made his first short film in 1999 but only really started to become productive in his work from 2010 onwards, only making his theatrical debut with The Wild Boys in 2017 and making short films beforehand. Parallels can be made to Guy Maddin, in his implementation and open influence to older cinema, but he is his own figure and if it was easier to see his work, defining this distinction would be a hell of a lot easier for me.

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We begin with Boro in a Box, his most famous work in which it loosely interprets the life of Polish director Walerian Borowczyk from birth to throughout his career in A-to-Z format, a visible reference to Borowczyk's own short filmmaking like Grandmother's Encyclopaedia (1963). It's a loose interpretation of his life as some eyebrows will be raised high, on display openly its own fantastical and perverse tale where Borowczyk is a man born as a box, a literal Kino-Eye, whose mother has an erotic dalliance with a horse briefly and his career here consists of long warehouses of naked people he films with a living Cronenbergian film camera. Yet wherever Walerian Borowczyk is, he'd probably appreciate the tone, for Borowczyk was a fascinating figure. Beginning in stop motion - (probably the most debatable moment for me is how Mandico dismisses co-director Jan Lenica of the early Polish shorts completely) - Borowczyk was championed for his animation and then his earliest steps into live action feature cinema in the likes of Blanche (1972). Than he was ostracised, until the recent and justly needed critical evaluation in the 2010s, for decades when he switched to erotic cinema with 1973's Immoral Stories, which he stayed in through his career for the most part afterwards but tragically made him a pariah for many, hence that necessary critical evaluation in the 2010s was a vital necessary, making converts like myself when I witnessed his cinema to be precise, full of texture and elegance, sensual and openly transgressive as a virtue.

So he might respect Mandico depicting him, as mention, born as a literal box on an umbilical cord whose limbs and torso grow out when he grows up, an obsessive who films when his father gives him a living camera and tries to find himself in this raw, dirty world of texture, grimness and explicit sexuality. Beautifully shot in black-and-white, but openly perverse from the get-go, Mandico springs out of the gate with his intentions following Boro's conception, his mother with her sister in the woods, playing "angels" where they choke each other half to death until they see them, only for her future husband to appear dressed as a tree and in an uncomfortable blur of molestation and consensual sex seduce her. This transgression, thankfully, is wide and spans further to deliberately offend anyone - between full frontal male and female nudity, Boro having a similar situation with a man in a train cart who'll become his collaborator, his mother (Elina Löwensohn, who also provides Boro's voice in the narration) having a sensual interaction with a horse, which is explicitly referencing Borowczyk's The Beast (1975) both in its human and beast sex and, in the silhouette of phallus, the more shocking moment of that film at the beginning where Borowczyk filmed an actual horse castration onscreen. The transgressive streak, in any other context if the tone was wrong, would offend many but Mandico manages to make it feels appropriate. It would, in another context, rub people the wrong way how Borowczyk is treated but, like when Isabella Rossellini and Guy Maddin depicted her father Roberto as a giant stomach in My Dad Is 100 Years Old (2005), it feels appropriate, here gleefully playing to Borowczyk's desire even before his later erotic films of playing with transgression and subversion.

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Whilst it's a fantasised story, the tale of Boro fits the real man named Borowczyk, who was respected for his animation and art films only to be damned for his turn to erotic cinema, Boro the Box Headed and his living camera here becoming marginalised in his own world as tragically Borowczyk was, but neither compromising. And aesthetically Mandico's work is incredible, a dream-like but grimy world where dirt, salvia, and various forms intermingled with a fetishisation of bodies and objects Borowczyk also had. Mandico's clear trademarks, whilst following from influences, is a pansexual transgression in the nude bodies onscreen, and depicting Boro having a sexual experience on a train with a man who'd assist him with his films. That and the overt fantastical details which are constant throughout, such as the aforementioned camera, or Boro seducing a woman at a young age with feather on sticks coming out of pockets in his box, leading to her nude body as a giant projection over a fireworks display and Boro running below back and forth to bring her to orgasm.

And it's clear, even as the first Bertrand Mandico work I have seen, that starting properly with his career here onwards he's built and honed his craft over many years, only finally making a feature length film in 2017 with The Wild Boys and, like a few favourite directors of mine, using the years to churn out shorts that are obsessed with interests he can draw from with greater depth for later feature films if he so wishes to. Boro's tale, even in only forty minutes, is a life fully fleshed out, from recounting experiencing from inside his mother's womb her falling down a cliff to returning home to his parents one last time after decades in France, and in spite of its short length it argues of being as expansive and dramatic as any film considerably longer then it.

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Living Still Life

Screenplay: Bertrand Mandico

Cast: Elina Löwensohn as Fièvre; Jean-Marc Montmont as L'homme

Living Still Life, quoting Walt Disney is French in an intertitle at the beginning, takes animation to an extreme when a woman named Fièvre (Elina Löwensohn) acquires dead animals in the countryside and animates on a giant canvas in her home. It's immediately eye catching, as befitting the quotation this 2012 short looks like a live action Disney film in colour and bright fantastical flora...only to have an eerie, disturbing yet magical story take place that feels like a dark fairy tale. One where a ritualistic act, done four times over four acts, lead to Mandico actually animating dead animals as stop motion creatures.

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As someone who has brushed against thanatophobia, they are very sobering scenes. Powerful, but knowing (unless an incredible practical effects artist was involve) that real animal corpses were used effected even me and would definitely be unsettling for some, worthy of warning even if the character of Fièvre attaches flowers to the burst open stomach of a dog. As with Boro in the Box, the production is incredible, also even in terms of the music in his work, between the at-times creepy score used for Boro in the Box to here appropriately magical but befitting its effective content. All of this builds to when Fièvre comes aware of a man who spies on her through the acts, someone who [Spoiler Alert] wants her to animate his recently deceased wife, synchronising to her own fantasy of animating a dead woman she directly tells the audience in the first scene of the short. [Spoiler Ends]

It would be criminal not to mention actress Elina Löwensohn at this point, effectively his muse since she started working in his films since Boro in the Box to The Wild Boys. Already a striking figure physically and as an actress in the performances, I was surprised when something clicked in my memory and realised she was the titular Nadja of Michael Almereyda's 1994 spin on the vampire story, having gone from that film over the years into a fascinating run of films with the likes of Hal Hartley to a variety of idiosyncratic directors, the kind of career that'd get ignored barring a few major films like Schindler's List (1993) but for those in the know (and when you see films like Living Still Life) command respect especially as she is great in both Mandico films I am covering. That she works with Mandico now is proof of his abilities, as Boro in the Box demanded a lot from her beyond the nude scenes whilst still treating her toroles actors would die for, in a mere short like Living Still Life providing a complicated character in just a short amount of time. Together, alongside Boro in the Box, it paints a great painting of the pair as collaborators.

Abstract Spectrum:

Boro in the Box: Fantastical/Grotesque/Surreal

Living Still Life: Eerie/Fantastical

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

Boro in the Box: High

Living Still Life: None

Personal Opinion:

In just two shorts, Bertrand Mandico stood out and immediately won me over with his work. I only hope The Wild Boys, his theatrical length debut, makes his work more easily accessible in the future. 

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