Nous n'irons plus au bois (1955)
Directed by Ivan Govar

Film Review

Nous n'irons plus au bois was the first film directed by Yvan Govar, a low-budget Belgian production that Govar financed with money provided by his well-heeled parents, Jean Govaerts (a successful painter) and Nelly Van Kelekom, who ran a thriving art gallery in Ostend.  Govar was only nineteen when he made the film, having turned his back on a promising acting career after three years with the famous Renaud-Barrault theatre company in Paris.  Filmed on 16mm film with an inexperienced cast and crew, Govar's debut piece has a casual roughness and amateurishness to it that makes it resemble one of the early films of the French New Wave (the similarities with Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge, Truffaut's Les 400 coups and Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle are as striking as they are uncanny), but there is also a potent and very distinctive charm, a stark and bitter lyricism that would manifest itself in all of Govar's subsequent films.

Govar gives away the entire plot with a notice of a faits divers right at the start of the film, and in doing so he accentuates the impression of fatalistic doom that pursues the hero as he tries and fails to make a new life for himself.  Yan may have served his time (after killing his wicked stepmother), but no one seems willing to give him a second chance, and, through a strange set of circumstances that somehow combine Grimms' fairytale and even grimmer film noir, he ends up losing the only friend he has left and kills a second time - with an outcome that is as horrific as it is totally predictable.  Sympathetically portrayed by Jacques Sempey (a Jérémie Renier look-a-like), Yan is indelibly presented to us as the child-like innocent, forever excluded from a world that is too quick to judge others whilst being completely blind to its own sickening venality.  (In this respect the film has a strong resonance with Robert Bresson's Mouchette, made 12 years later).  Even the one friend Yan thought he could count on (a kind-hearted farmer played by Govar himself) turns out to be as rotten as the rest, reminding us that friendship, like the beauty of the femme fatale who sends Yan plunging to his doom, is often only skin deep, and sometimes viciously treacherous.

Nous n'irons plus au bois is by no means a polished production, and it is ludicrous to expect it to be such.  Govar's talents shine through the film's obvious imperfections and there are more than a few inspired touches to make up for the occasional mishaps.  It is hard not to be struck by how unrelentingly oppressive the film is - the Flanders setting is imbued with a menace and melancholy that gradually intensify as the drama builds to its gruesome climax.  Equally, you cannot help but feel Yan's increasing sense of alienation from a world that refuses to take him back after his fall from grace.  The symbolism of the final shot - the young outcast slain by the mob whilst clinging to a tree - is crude but incredibly apt.

After this promising debut, Govar used up his remaining financial resources on his first two features - Le Toubib, médecin du gang (1955) and Le Circuit de minuit (1956) - both interesting films in their own right but neither succeeded in engaging the critics or audiences.  Govar's career as an independent film producer was then over, but he would make five further commercial films in France - the highpoint being La Croix des vivants (1962) - before lack of recognition drove him to give up filmmaking for good.  Considered by some to be an auteur ahead of his time, by others a cinéaste maudit, Govar has acquired a cult following since his premature death in 1988.  Nous n'irons plus au bois isn't only an excellent introduction to his work, it also feels like an allegory of his future career as a filmmaker.  In the person of Yan, the man no one can accept and who is finally driven away by the unthinking prejudiced rabble, Govar paints a self-portrait that is frighteningly pescient.

Film Synopsis

Leaving a juvenile detention centre after serving a term for the accidental killing of his stepmother, Yan makes his way across country to his home village in Flanders, eager to make a fresh start.  His father will have nothing more to do with him, and neither will most of the friends and neighbours he once knew.  The only friend he can count on now is Gus, a young farmer who offers him work and a place to stay, a little shack in the woods.  Whilst dreaming of his ideal woman, Yan unwittingly attracts the attention of Maria, Gus's promiscuous girlfriend.  When Gus finds out that Yan and Maria have been seeing each other behind his back he is consumed with jealousy and brings an abrupt end to their friendship.  It is Yan that Maria prefers, but as she urges him to elope with her he strikes out and she falls to the ground, hitting her head on a rock.  Realising that he has killed a second time, Yan takes flight.  Acting as if they have a crazed murderer in their midst, Gus and the other villagers band together and go chasing after Yan, determined to hunt him to his death...