By SHAWN MACOMBER
Starring Alexandre Steiger, Christophe Paou and Lilith Grasmug
Directed by Jean-Christophe Meurisse
Written by Jean-Christophe Meurisse, Amelie Philippe and Yohann Gloaguen
Dark Star Pictures
For a great deal of its runtime, the French feature BLOODY ORANGES (now out on VOD) resembles the sort of pitch-black satire that post-Alan Partridge Armando Iannucci has, via films such as THE DEATH OF STALIN and the television series VEEP, very nearly perfected. Which is to say, it is smart, hilarious, biting and deceptively complex in the way it interweaves storylines and a large cast of characters in service of its ultimate raison d’etre.
There is the elderly couple (Lorella Cravotta and Olivier Saladin) in a kind of THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY?-esque cash-prize dance competition; their son (Alexandre Steiger), a stereotypically aloof and surly attorney who does not have his ducks in as much of a row as he would like his parents and siblings to believe; a young teenage girl, Louise (Lilith Grasmug), anxious to assert her autonomy and lose her virginity; a sleazy government minister (Christophe Paou), desperately trying to control the media narrative and his public perception…even as he trashes the needs and aspirations of that very public behind closed doors; and a cab driver (Pascal Tagnati) melding toxic masculinity and poor impulse control.
And then writer/director Jean-Christophe Meurisse drops a demon in human form–think a cross between Buffalo Bill in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and Bill Murray’s WHAT ABOUT BOB? character–into the proceedings, and suddenly BLOODY ORANGES careens toward territory more likely to host, say, THE LOVED ONES, IRREVERSIBLE and THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. The satire, once biting, flies out the window, and in an instant we’re in a whiplash-inducing, viscera-splattering cinematic abattoir where the boundaries of how a human being can be degraded and violated–justly and otherwise–are explored. (Wait until you see the sequence to which the title alludes…)
As a storytelling device, this obviously has the potential to go completely sideways. After all, as you can tell from the preceding paragraphs, there is almost no way to review the film effectively without referring to its central twist. So, in practice, maybe the audiences at Cannes or Fantastic Fest felt the full power of the narrative sucker punch, but the rest of us are going into the story with a flashlight.
Yet it does work, for a couple of reasons. First, the dialogue and characterization in the first half of the film are so damn good–seamless, really. And second, the cast is nimble and talented enough to sell their respective roles on both sides of the divide. This is particularly true of Grasmug, who inhabits so powerfully, beautifully and achingly every point of Louise’s arc from innocent and vulnerable to self-actualized and empowered to violated and abused to, finally, a fiery, bad-ass dark hero all-too-well-suited to our moment in time.
BLOODY ORANGES is a big gamble—real cinematic high-roller stuff. And one almost gasps when Meurisse, cast and crew hit those snake eyes. This is a weird, wild, unsettling experience, to be sure, but, yin and yang, it is in its stark contrasts that it finds a singular harmony.
