La Traque (1975)
Directed by Serge Leroy

Film Review

Ah, le charme sauvage de la bourgeoisie...  Serge Leroy wasn't the first filmmaker to lift the lid on French middleclass respectability and reveal the festering nastiness that lies beneath (Luis Buñuel and Claude Chabrol had got there well before him and made almost a career of it) but he was probably the most brutally unforgiving.  In La Traque, the second in a very mixed series of thrillers he directed, Leroy shows how a seemingly respectable group of individuals (tellingly, all men) can become transformed into wild animals when a pack mentality and primitive instinct for self-preservation take over.  Anyone who has read William Golding's Lord of the Flies will have indelibly etched on his or her mind the humiliation and slaughter of Piggy by his schoolboy peers.  What Leroy offers is an even more spectacular descent into savagery, which is all the more horrific because of its chilling plausiblility.

La Traque has elements of both the survival movie and psycho-thriller but it doesn't fit comfortably into either of these genres and practically inhabits a class of its own.  A naturalistic suspense thriller, it looks like something that Alfred Hitchcock and Ken Loach might have cooked up if they had ever worked together.   Filmed entirely on location in what looks like the most depressing rural backwater in Normandy, without so much as a note of background music, just the mournful sounds of nature in winter, La Traque has a grimly oppressive quality that, once it has taken hold, doesn't let go until the very last frame.  More than just a thriller, the film is an astute, deeply cynical social critique that not only mocks the hollowness of bourgeois morality, it also serves as a powerful indictment of the way in which women are treated in a male-oriented society.  Pro-feminist, anti-bourgeois sentiment is at the heart of La Traque, and it is hard to think of another film that offers such a stridently pessimistic assault on French society of the 1970s.

What makes La Traque particularly disturbing is the ease with which it draws us onto the side of the hunters and makes us complicit in their crime.  The woman who is hunted to her death is not a strong, likeable character with a clearly defined personality.  Blandly played by the American actress Mimsy Farmer, she is a bleating, puny inadequate who seems fated to end up as one of life's victims.  We feel no more pity for her than we do for a rabbit being chased across a field by a gamekeeper.  The hunters, by contrast, are all fully developed individuals with whom we can identify, and with surprising ease.  They are not monsters, and most are played by actors that are sympathetic and greatly loved.  To any avid French film enthusiast, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Philippe Léotard, Michael Lonsdale and Michel Constantin feel like old friends, the kind of affable individuals you could easily invite round to dinner or have a drink with.  We belong in their company.

The first shock comes when Léotard and Marielle rape Farmer in a barn thirty minutes into the film.  What shocks us most is not the act itself, which is pretty gruelling to watch, but the fact that afterwards we find we are on the side of the perpetrators.  By taking her stand against the dominant male and not agreeing to a sensible but immoral compromise, Farmer makes herself a willing prey in the hunt that then takes up the bulk of the film's runtime.  Try as you might, you just cannot fathom why this poor, fragile creature fails to elicit our sympathy and why we end up siding with the animals intent on her destruction.  It is almost as if we are conditioned, by some primeval group instinct, to align ourselves with the strong against the weak.  La Traque is an incredibly disturbing film, not for what it shows on the screen (which is disturbing enough to give you nightmares), but for what it reveals about ourselves.

Film Synopsis

A young English woman, Helen Wells, arrives in a small Normandy village, where she intends to rent an old farmhouse.  A short while later, she encounters a party of men who are hunting wild boar.  Two of the men, Albert and Paul Danville, rape the woman, whilst their nervous companion, Chamond, watches on.  Helen manages to escape into the woods, pursued by Albert.  The huntsmen agree to keep quiet about the affair, but Helen is determined to escape.  There then ensues a fierce hunt to the death...