Les Mouvements du bassin (2012)
Directed by Hervé P. Gustave

Film Review

With Les Mouvements du bassin, Hervé P. Gustave (better known by his initials HPG) clearly has his sights set on embarking on a new career as France's coolest and/or weirdest auteur filmmaker, having spent the last twenty years blazing a very prominent trail in pornographic cinema as both an actor and producer.  It has been just over a decade since HPG had his first brush with conventional cinema, trading on his reputation as a major porn star to appear in Catherine Breillat's Romance (1998) and Bertrand Bonello's Le Pornographe (2001).  Now, following his first feature (a fascinating self-portrait On ne devrait pas exister, 2006), HPG appears to be in the process of re-inventing and/or re-branding himself.  Whether anyone will take him seriously is another matter.

The first thing to say about Les Mouvements du bassin is that it is definitely not an exploitation film.  It is far too weird and provocative for that. With its deranged sense of humour and constant flitting between reality and fantasy, the film risks alienating anyone who bothers to sit down and watch it, and yet its eccentricity and stylistic excesses are what make it so strangely compelling.  HPG's totally misplaced self-confidence gives him a fearlessness that allows him to try something that most first-time filmmakers wouldn't dare attempt, which is to follow his creative instincts blindly and see what comes out of it.  The result is predictably a mess, but a mess that has a kind of mad genius about it - the film equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting.  Well, almost.

On paper, the plot sounds depressingly trite and familiar.  The film is about two people who are in search of happiness.  One (played by HPG himself) is a martial arts loving loner, the other a young woman determined to get herself pregnant.  They are two of the most pathetic examples of humanity you can imagine outside the Jerry Springer Show, and yet they both have an endearing quality about them.  Whilst Hervé plays the saddo voyeur, his lurid fantasies supplied by a pimp who looks suspiciously like Eric Cantona, Marion resorts to robbing a sperm bank when more conventional attempts at fertilization fail her.  The characters are about as subtle as the situations that HPG puts them into, but the film does somehow manage to make some poignant and original statements on the tragedy of solitude and the elusiveness of personal happiness.  Les Mouvements du bassin isn't so much a film as a crazy orgy of bad taste and unfocussed creativity - something that only someone as uninhibited as HPG could possibly have come up with.

Film Synopsis

Hervé is a solitary man who lives only for his lessons in self-defence. Having been dismissed from his job at a zoo because he depressed all the animals, he finds work as a night watchman in a factory.  He passes the time by spying on the courting couples that furtively come his way.  Marion is a young woman who is prepared to do anything to have a child.  One evening, she meets a nurse who falls in love with her.  The latter offers her love and pregnancy, but she will have to break into a sperm bank.  Hervé and Marion are two people in search of happiness who happen to run into one another in a hospital corridor...