MARTYRSPlot In A Nutshell
Writer/director Pascal Laugier’s 2008 entry in the “extreme French horror” subgenre, in which the seemingly motiveless massacre of a seemingly innocent French family turns out to be revenge on the part of an escapee from a shocking religious/scientific experiment.
Thoughts
I haven’t done a Moviegoer Diary entry in a while, and seeing as I had a death in the family a little over a week ago, perhaps Martrys was not the best film with which to dive back into the pool. Truly, I watched this movie with my mouth agape for at least two thirds of its running time, and I hesitate to say much about what happens in it for fear of ruining the experience for anyone brave or foolhardy enough to watch it.
I first heard of the title a few months ago on the Mondo Movie podcast when Ben Howard and Dan Auty discussed it as part of their roundup of last year’s FrightFest in London — and the film seemed to render them as speechless as I find myself now. I knew I had to check it out; it’s not quite as grueling as Inside (for me, still the most intense of this new wave of French horror/torture movies), but it’s pretty sensational, and marks Pascal Laugier as perhaps the most promising horror director to come along since David Cronenberg.
Without discussing any particulars, I can tell you that Martrys has a few things working in its favour. First, the plot takes at least three hairpin turns (I wouldn’t call them twists), each one more surprising than the last, each one expanding the world of the film and the meaning of what we’ve already seen in genuinely provocative ways. (I hate even having mentioned the massacre of the family at the top of the film, since that little bloodbath comes right out of the blue as well.)
Second, Laugier pulls off three unforgettable images of... well, let’s just call them “female bodies in extreme distress.” The mildest of the three is the opening image, of a young girl clad only in her underwear, her face beaten and bloody, running frantically away from what appears to be an abandoned factory building. (The scene seems like a homage to the opening of Kiss Me Deadly, and the film builds to an equally apocalyptic ending.) The next two are even more astonishing; one involves an actress whose physical condition is its own special effect, while the final and most daring image involves an excellent (and completely horrifying) makeup job.
Third, Martyrs’ brutal concluding section —easily the hardest part of the film to watch — finds a way out of the can-you-top-this cul-de-sac of most extreme horror films by taking the story in a completely unexpected religious direction. Dan and Ben likened the film to The Passion of Joan of Arc, which I know sounds ridiculous, but it’s actually a useful comparison. Not that many critics are buying it — the film just started playing theatres in England and the critics at the Guardian and the Independent both dismissed it with briefly, unusually contemptuous one-paragraph reviews.
We’ll see if it’s received any differently here in Canada, where it just came out on DVD — the film is a Canada/France co-production and was shot, amazingly enough, in Quebec. My big fear is that the Tories will find out Canada helped finance this film, which is definitely out of step with mainstream tastes, and use it as one more wedge in their battle to cut off arts and culture funding. We’ve seen this thing happen before, some 30 years ago, when Saturday Night magazine made a little Canadian horror movie called They Came From Within, partly funded by the National Film Board, into a cause célèbre. The director of that film? David Cronenberg.
RATING: 4.5/5
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THE BIG GUNDOWNPlot In A Nutshell
Director Sergio Sollima’s 1966 spaghetti Western, in which lawman Lee Van Cleef is hired to track down a Mexican rebel (Tomas Milian) accused of raping and killing a 12-year-old girl, only to become increasingly convinced of the man’s innocence.
Thoughts
This is the first non-Sergio Leone spaghetti Western I’ve ever seen, and it only makes me want to explore this rich genre much further — although the lack of quality DVDs and the fact that most of these films are known by a bewildering number of alternate titles will make the journey a difficult one.
But if I can have some Ennio Morricone music blaring at me the whole time, I don’t think I’ll mind. The opening credits for The Big Gundown are set to a wonderfully vulgar Morricone overture, complete with a sensationally overwrought vocal performance by a singer billed only as “Cristy.” The credits are deliberately modelled after the ones in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, but why not model yourself after the best? These are credits that really fire you up — immediately you’re in the mood to watch the hell out of this movie.
And your attention is rewarded with a cracking good yarn. The film isn’t as mythic as the Leone films, but what film is? The script (co-written by director Sergio Sollima) reminds me a little of Donald Westlake’s comic crime novels in the way that it keeps allowing Tomas Milian’s crafty Mexican to get caught by Lee Van Cleef’s relentless lawman, and then devises one clever way after another for him to wriggle out of his grasp. My favourite is the bit where Milian, his hands tied behind his back, uses his toes to price Van Cleef with a stinger from a cactus and tricks him into thinking he’s been bitten by a snake. You can’t help but see echoes of Van Cleef and Milian in Tommy Lee Jones’ relationship with Harrison Ford in The Fugitive — only here, it’s the lawman who’s the stoic one instead of the runaway criminal.
The Big Gundown also contains a fascinating supporting character in Baron Von Schulenberg (Gérard Herter), a Prussian marksman with a neatly waxed mustached and a monocle who lurks around the edges of the story. I’ve never expected to run across an Erich Von Stroheim type in a spaghetti Western (“The sun looks like a big ball of blood!” he announces happily in one scene), and his presence in the climactic showdown that gives the film its title is a welcome novelty.
Sollima really nails that ending too. The dust of the final gun battles has cleared, and only Van Cleef and Milian remain standing — former adversaries, now respectful comrades who now must each go their own separate way. “You would never have caught me!” laughs Milian triumphantly as he rides off — and instead of letting us hear Van Cleef’s reply, Sollima lets Morricone’s theme music have the last word, with Cristy dementedly oversinging the words “Never! No, never! Never! No, never!” over and over again. That’s how it’s done, directors!
RATING: 4.5/5
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