Near Death Experience (2014)
Directed by Benoît Delépine, Gustave Kervern

Film Review

Gustave Kervern and Benoît Delépine's latest full-on swipe at modern life and all its attendant shortcomings is their most radical yet, a bleakly comical existential poem made on a shoestring budget that somehow manages to stretch Hamlet's 'To be or not to be' soliloquy into a full-length feature.  The anarchic directing duo have found success, with both critics and audiences, through their previous anti-this, that and the other burlesque diatribes - notably Mammuth (2010) and Le Grand soir (2012) - but Near Death Experience, their most radical film yet, is a much harder sell, not least because it deals with that most unsaleable of subjects, suicide.

As if this wasn't enough to dissuade audiences, Delépine and Kervern made the brave (possibly lunatic) decision to cast Michel Houellebecq, one of France's most controversial writers, in the film's solo role, that of a late-middle aged nobody who sees suicide as the only development opportunity open to him.  Despite winning the Prix Goncourt, France's highest literary accolade, in 2010 for his novel La Carte et le Territoire, Houellebecq is ill-regarded by many critics and has been labelled obscene, racist and misogynistic.  Houellebecq has already appeared in front of the camera, in Guillaume Nicloux's comedy Enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq (2014), and has himself directed two shorts and a feature-length film, La Possibilité d'une île (2008).  Whilst he may not have the most engaging of personalities, Houellebecq proves to be admirably well-suited for the role of the world-weary Paul in Delépine and Kervern's film and, in the course of his rambling meditations on the futility of existence and several laughably botched suicide attempts, he becomes a likeably unlikeable anti-hero, a lemming-like version of Mr Bean.

The main problem with the film is that, being the only character in it (save a handful of bit parts) Houellebecq has an enormous burden to shoulder and it soon becomes apparent that Near Death Experience is a moyen métrage that has been stretched way beyond the point at which it can safely carry its audience with it.  Filmed with a low-resolution digital camera that fails to get the best value from the stunning Provençal location scenery that is the backdrop for most of the film, the film has a cheap, homemade feel to it that leaves you thinking it may have been made for youtube rather than the cinema.

There is a sense that, in railing against both the packaged vacuity of modern life and cinematic convention, Delépine and Kervern doth protest a tad too much and, as a result, their latest off-kilter bundle of prickly fun lacks the punch and pungency of their previous wholehearted raspberries to conformity.  That said, it is a daring attempt at something new and, to its authors credit, it does find plenty of humour (albeit of a weirdly macabre kind) and something meaningful to say about the grimmest of subjects.  You are unlikely to kill yourself laughing, but Near Death Experience does have great novelty value and is the perfect antidote to all those banal comedies we are subjected to these days which really do sap your will to live.

Film Synopsis

Paul is a 50-something call centre employee who has had enough of his miserable non-existence.  Married, with children, he lives a crumby life which consists of just one crass, life-sapping mundanity after another.  One Friday the 13th he watches a television programme which gives him just the spur he needs to get him out of the groove he has been trapped in all these years.  He mounts his racing bike and hastens away from the suburbs, heading for the mountains where he will kill himself.  Unfortunately, suicide is not nearly as straightforward as it seems...