Au fond des bois (2010)
Directed by Benoît Jacquot

Film Review

The true story of a 19th century liaison between a vagabond and the daughter of a bourgeois household provides director Benoît Jacquot with the perfect excuse to revisit some of his favourite themes, including the nature of sexual desire and a woman's yearning for escape from a repressive milieu.  Au fond des bois is Jacquot's darkest film to date and also his most ambiguous, as it leaves much to the spectator's imagination and does not attempt to answer all the questions it poses.  A masterfully constructed period piece which cannot help evoking three of François Truffaut's best films - L'Enfant sauvage (1969), Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971) and L'Histoire d'Adèle H. (1975) - it explores the potency and mystique of desire with the perspicacity and honesty that we have come to expect from one of France's leading auteur filmmakers.

Now in her fifth Benoît Jacquot film, Isild Le Besco is shaping up to be the director's ideal muse and is perfectly suited to play the ambiguous heroine whose sexual awakening in the course of the film pummels our senses with the brutality of an erupting volcano.  Equally well-cast as the satyr-like tramp who unleashes Le Besco's passions is the charismatic Argentinean actor Nahuel Perez Biscayart, who was first revealed in Pablo Fendrik's La Sangre Brota (2008).  The contrast between Le Besco's repressed Joséphine (portrayed as a mix of fairytale princess and Brontë-esque heroine) and Biscayart's wild child Timothée is at first striking, leaving us in no doubt who is the victim and who is the tormenter.  But things are not always what they first seem and in the course of the film the mantle of innocence shifts from one character to the other, so that ultimately it is Timothée who steals our sympathies, the victim of a terrible conspiracy of circumstances.

The initial seduction of Joséphine by Timothée is terrifying to watch and culminates in a rape of bestial intensity.  It really does look as if Joséphine is succumbing to a mystical enchantment and has no power to resist Timothée as he lures her away from the safe bosom of her home into the naked savagery of the woods, where more sordid Pagan shenanigans await her.  Yet we soon begin to wonder whether seeing is believing, whether what we are in fact witnessing is not reality but a fiction created by Joséphine as she gives herself unwittingly to her first sexual adventure.  To someone experiencing these primitive passions for the first time, the sexual impulse can so easily be interpreted as an act demonic possession, and so Joséphine imagines herself to be under the spell of a sorcerer, unable to resist the savage act of deflowering that she is subjected to. 

When she is returned to civilisation after her frenzied frolic in the foliage, Joséphine persuades herself and others that she was abducted against her will, unable to accept that she could be an equal participant in such a vile exhibition of carnal self-indulgence.  The scales of justice naturally turn against the outsider, who must therefore be punished for corrupting an innocent.  The truth of the amorous encounter is not one that a civilised bourgeois society can accept, and so whilst a calculating young woman embarks on a predictably passionless marriage, an innocent languishes in prison, the real victim of that age-old enchantment which defies understanding.

The exquisite subtlety of Jacquot's sparse screenplay is supremely well-served by his flawless mise-en-scène and two outstanding central performances which provide the most vivid and unsettling depiction of a passionate romantic encounter.  What starts out as something akin to a Gothic nightmare evolves into a kind of idyllic fairytale, a transition that powerfully evokes a young woman's mastery over her own sexuality.  A haunting and insightful film, Au fond des bois embraces familiar themes with startling originality and maturity and is arguably Jacquot's most accomplished film to date - a film that celebrates the mystery of sex but shocks us with its terrifying destructive power.

Film Synopsis

In 1865, Joséphine leads a comfortable but dull existence with her father, a successful physician.  One day, a scruffy vagabond turns up on her father's doorstep asking for help.  The stranger, Timothée, becomes an object of fascination for her father, but Joséphine is instinctively afraid of him and senses he is exerting a strange magnetic control over her.  A short while later, Joséphine is lured by Timothée away from her home, into the countryside nearby.  Here, they live like wild animals, free from the laws of man.  But when Joséphine returns to her home, she is convinced that Timothée took her away against her will, and testifies as much when the tramp is tried for abducting her...