Un couteau dans le coeur (2018)
Directed by Yann Gonzalez

Film Review

With his second feature, Un couteau dans le coeur (Knife + Heart), up-and-coming director Yann Gonzalez indulges his ardent passion for slasher thrillers of the 1970s with a wild abandon - and quite a few gallons of theatrical blood.  The gloriously über-stylised giallos from such Italian masters of the genre as Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci were Gonzalez's main starting point, although the influence of various American filmmakers (notably Brian De Palma) can also be felt in a full-throttle homage-cum-parody that manages to be both viscerally shocking and irresistibly hilarious - roughly in equal measure.

Gonzalez's first full-length film passed almost without notice, although his subsequent short Les Îles took took the Queer Palm at Cannes in 2017.  The fact that his latest feature was honoured with the 2018 Jean-Vigo Prize for best feature (shared with Jean-Bernard Marlin's hard-hitting urban drama Shéhérazade) augurs well for an independent filmmaker of undoubted flair and chutzpah.  Un couteau dans le coeur could easily pass for an over-indulgent pastiche of the kind of trashy horror flick that went out of fashion in the 1980s, but it is actually considerably more than this - as becomes readily apparent if you make the effort to look beneath its kitsch-encrusted surface.

This is a film that ingeniously employs the lurid tropes of the 1970s slasher movie in a way that compels us to look inwards and ask ourselves just why we are drawn to this pretty demeaning species of lowbrow entertainment.  What is it about horror movies, particularly those of an exploitation bent, that fascinates us so much?  Can it be that they express something about our true nature - our repressed desires, our darkest neuroses - that no other form of cinematic art can reach?  Beyond the spurious titillation of seeing anonymous characters menaced, attacked and brutally slain by a mysterious masked figure (whose weaponry includes a dildo fitted with a retractable blade), what is there but the compulsion to see into our own souls and discover a part of our identity that truly appals us?

According to Gonzalez, his film was inspired by the real-life story of Anne-Marie Tensi, a producer of low-grade gay pornographic films who had some success in the 1970s.  By all accounts, she had a fiery nature and became a alcoholic, her career and personal life both jeopardised by a stormy love affair with her editor Loïs Koenigswerther.  In Gonzalez's film, Vanessa Paradis models her portrayal on biographical accounts of Tensi, treating us to what is possibly the most complex and convincing of her screen roles to date.

Starting out as an international pop singer and supermodel, Paradis embarked on a screen career in the late 1980s and, having worked with some notable directors - Patrice Leconte (La Fille sur le pont), Pascal Chaumeil  (L'Arnacoeur), Anne Le Ny (Cornouaille) - she has proven to be a very capable actress.  One of the strengths of Un couteau dans le coeur, and the thing that most adequately compensates for its stylistic excesses and lack of original plot, is Paradis's intensely believable portrayal of a middle-aged career woman's desperate attempts to hold her life together as her world falls in around her.

Vanessa Paradis's dazzling turn is complemented by strong supporting contributions from Nicolas Maury, highly entertaining as an outrageously flamboyant soft core porn director, and Kate Moran, the main character's over-demanding girlfriend.  Also cropping up in this shameless orgy of cinematic self-referencing are Romane Bohringer, Ingrid Bourgoin and Jacques Nolot, all of whom lent their support to some notable gay-themed French movies of recent decades (respectively Les Nuits fauves, Simone Barbès ou la Vertu and La Chatte à deux têtes).

For all its uninhibited kitsch artistry and gore-spilling excesses, Un couteau dans le coeur is a stunning film d'auteur that reeks of art-house sophistication (and possibly a whiff of overblown self-importance).  The colour-saturated visuals and opulent mise-en-scène are a tad off-putting at first but gradually these work on our senses and what ultimately emerges is a peculiar baroque poetry that is fleetingly evocative of what we find in the more fantastic cinema exploits of Jean Cocteau and Georges Franju.

Watched as a conventional schlock thriller from a bygone era, the film has limited appeal beyond its obvious over-egged nostalgia value, but this is to do it a great injustice.  By allowing his creativity and humour to run riot, Yann Gonzalez creates a cinematic gem that is not only a thoughtful deconstruction of a once popular sub-genre, it also serves as an inexplicably alluring piece of film art that reaches deep into our psyche and reveals to us something about our selves that is far more unsettling than what it depicts on screen.

Film Synopsis

In the late 1970s, Anne Parèze is a 40-something producer of low-budget porn movies based in Paris.  As her career wanes, she turns to drink and becomes increasingly emotionally unstable.  Her fragile state of mind is not helped when her partner of ten years and trusted film editor, Loïs, suddenly walks out on her.  In a desperate bid to win back her girlfriend, Anne commits herself to producing her most ambitious film so far, and in this venture she hopes to be supported by her loyal director friend Archibald.

These plans look as if they might be well and truly scuppered when a mysterious masked killer enters the fray and begins committing a series of grisly murders.  The only thing that connects the unfortunate victims is that they have all worked on Anne's films.  When the police prove to be incapable of resolving the mystery, Anne embarks on her own investigation whilst preparing her next film.  By laying a trap she hopes to force the killer into revealing his identity, but in doing so she only succeeds in making it easier for him to strike again...