Fou d'amour (2015)
Directed by Philippe Ramos

Film Review

For his fourth feature, Fou d'amour, director Philippe Ramos revisits the subject of a short film he made almost twenty years previously, Ici-bas (1996), which recounted a real-life crime (the so-called Affaire de curé d'Uruffe) that was a big news story in France in the mid-1950s.  The Catholic priest Guy Desnoyers made the headlines after brutally killing the mistress he had made pregnant, along with her unborn baby - a crime for which he was sentenced to forced labour for the rest of his life following his confession.  In his typically idiosyncratic film, Ramos does not underplay the gruesome nature of Desnoyers's crime (be prepared for some pretty disturbing images in the film's final act), but he clearly wants us to be on the side of the priest, presenting him less as a debauched maniac and more as a tragic innocent, the victim of a hypocritical society and those inscrutable cosmic agencies that shape our destinies.

Fou d'amour is a significant departure from Ramos's previous films, sombre period offerings that include the Moby Dick-inspired Capitaine Achab (2007) and Joan of Arc drama Jeanne captive (2011).  After a macabre opening depicting the guillotining of a man who turns out to be the main protagonist, the film starts out in a cheekily humorous vein, with more than an echo of those saucy French comedies of the 1970s - Joël Séria's Les Galettes de Pont-Aven (1975) springs readily to mind.  Taking his cue from Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), Ramos allows his main character (reduced to a decapitated head set in a Christ-like pose) to tell his story in flashback after his death, so it's no surprise that he comes across as a living saint - an impression that Ramos mischievously reinforces with some tableaux carefully arranged to imitate devotional paintings.  By combining the erotic and the metaphysical, the film evokes the work of the controversial writer Georges Bataille.  As well as having an active interest in various forms of human perversion, Bataille also founded a secret society that had a thing about human sacrifice and whose symbol was a headless man - two motifs in Ramos's film that designate the fate of its tragic hero.

Melvil Poupaud is probably the last person you would expect to see headlining an erotic comedy in a cassock, and yet his presence as the over-libidinous lead in Ramos's film is what gives it such dramatic power and poignancy.  After his close encounter with Madame Guillotine (ironically the result of losing his head with another woman), Poupaud's priest introduces himself to us as an affable soul whose only aim in life is to make people happy - especially well-endowed young women who share his devotion to the pleasures of the flesh.  There's a seductively hypnotic quality to Poupaud's mellifluous narration that makes the beatific priest look far more like a saint than a sinner as he indulges in his peculiar form of worship, a man transfigured by desires sated and anticipated in his lush Garden of Eden.

But, as anyone who has ever read or heard the Book of Genesis knows, the man who eats the forbidden fruit is sure to be ejected from paradise before he has even had the chance to spit out the pips.  The priest's fall is as sudden as it is ignominious, and when it begins, with the shock discovery that he has made one of his divine playthings pregnant, the mood of the film changes abruptly.  The comedy is over and the tragedy is soon in full throttle, with the priest succumbing to a form of insanity that will ultimately make a monster of him and lead him to commit an act of the utmost vileness.  This is where Poupaud's acting prowess comes in to its own.  The transition from loveable hedonist to murdering fiend is so convincingly and so seamlessly accomplished by the actor that you continue to sympathise with him even when he has passed the point of no return.

Poupaud's priest is a man with two sides that reflect the duality inherent in us all - Ramos implies as much at the start of the film by having him sliced in two by a guillotine blade.  This split personality is shared by the film itself which adopts a two-part structure, with an abrupt tonal shift that marks the start of the priest's descent into Hell.  The two halves of the film resemble two sides of diptych painting - of the sort that may be attributed to Hieronymous Bosch, with the delights of an earthly paradise on one side set against the demonic torments of Hell on the other.  In the midst of insanity, Poupaud's priest is no more wicked than he was before his fall.  We do not see him as monster, but merely as a tragic victim of those cosmic forces that delight in making us humans miserable.  His ultimate act of desecration is sickening, but even in this we are moved to pity him and see the greater injustice that lies behind it.  Philippe Ramos's light and dark parable on human frailty ought to provoke intense revulsion, but strangely it doesn't.  It's a singular work that engages our sympathies and indulges our pleasures, reminding us as it does so that, contrary to what William Blake would have us believe, every one of us is destined to have our share of sweet delight and endless night.

Film Synopsis

In 1959, a young Catholic priest takes up his new position in an idyllic rural community and soon makes himself the most popular man in the area.  Not content with saving his parishioners' souls, he occupies himself with their social activities, creating a football club for the village's youngsters and organising amateur dramatics for the more theatrically minded.  His greatest pleasure he reserves for himself, seducing the female members of his parish and indulging in his wild erotic fantasies.  Is it not his duty, as a man of God, to worship his creator's handiwork and derive from it the fullest satisfaction?  The priest's earthly joys are crowned on the day that a beautiful blind girl named Rose gives herself to him in body and soul.  The sweet fruits of paradise soon turn sour when Rose reveals she is pregnant.  A morbid terror of what will now ensue drives the priest to commit a terrible act and he will lose his head in more ways than one...