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The Night Eats the World
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It’s an ordinary party night in somebody’s Parisian
apartment, right? The music is thumping away, some people are freaking out in
corners, others are dancing by themselves mindlessly, an aggressive guy bumps
into you as he storms out of the toilet … But Sam (Norwegian actor Anders
Danielsen Lie) is just not in the festive mood; he’s shown up to reclaim his
music tapes from an ex-girlfriend, Fanny (Sigrid Bouaziz). So he locks himself
in a back room with his bleeding nose, and takes a nap …
Sam discovers, when he awakes, that – hey presto! – a
zombie apocalypse has occurred. Just like that, and without any further backstory
explanation. The French title is even more matter-of-fact than its English
rendition: “night has devoured the world”, the deed is already done. For the
characters, understanding what has happened here is irrelevant; surviving it is
the main game.
And so Sam shoots a few of the walking dead in his
immediate vicinity, secures the doors and windows of this large, old-fashioned
apartment complex, explores each room, gathers food supplies, and hunkers down
in slightly crazed solitude – his only companion, for most of the story, being
an ambiguously sedate zombie neighbour (played by the great Denis Lavant from Holy Motors [2012]) trapped in an
elevator.
This film is only very lightly a horror movie.
Whenever Sam makes a racket by playing drums or screaming – usually from a
mounting feeling of cosmic despair – the zombies come pounding downstairs. But
director Dominique Rocher, adapting a popular 2012 book by Pit Agarmen (an
“open pseudonym” anagram for Martin Page, under which he writes genre novels),
largely eschews suspenseful scenes of the hero evading imminent undeath.
There is really only one rule of the zombie genre
operative here: to kill such a creature, aim well for their brains. But unlike
in, say, the classic films of George A. Romero, these shuffling ghouls aren’t
utilised for purposes of socio-political allegory; they don’t symbolise
anything in particular. They pose, rather, the grimly existential condition
within which the central character must face his lonely life.
The Night Eats the World offers an
intriguing amalgam of arthouse and pop genre impulses – and, as such, reflects
a trend growing as much in France as in Australia at present. The mass-market
magazine SoFilm (which has both
French and Spanish editions) gives the flavour of this current cultural
phenomenon: alongside its plethora of blokey profiles devoted to Tarantino
& co., it also organises laboratory-workshops for the professional
development of low-budget, horror-thriller-fantasy-comedy projects. What
matters in this context is not strictly copying a Hollywood model, but customising
it, giving it a canny and perhaps even lightly “national” twist.
Here’s where the art film references enter. An elderly
husband and wife who have killed themselves rather than face the zombie horde,
and whose corpses Sam respectfully decorates and seals away in a room: this
echoes Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012).
Sam knocking a hole in the floor in order to make contact with another living
soul – that’s surely a nod to the most avant-garde of apocalyptic films, Tsai
Ming-liang’s haunting Taiwanese production, The Hole (1998). (Come to think of it, Tsai’s films, like Apichatpong’s, or
Costa’s Horse
Money [2014], often
have an aura of the fantastique bordering on horror conventions; and Tsai’s recent parade of “walkers” –
including Lavant himself in Journey to the West [2014]! – are a bit like zombies.) The percussive musique concrète improvised by Sam on domestic appliances in
several scenes looks and sounds like an amalgam of Pablo Verón dancing it up in
the kitchen of Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson (1997),
and the moody muso protagonist of another French film, The Invisibles (2005), an erotic mystery-thriller (of sorts)
devised by former Cahiers du cinéma editor Thierry Jousse.
Hence the praise, from some critics, for The Night Eats the World as a cleverly minimalistic
horror film, more devoted to character psychology than scary thrills. Ariane
Allard in Positif, for example,
admires the way it “chooses to head for what is most essential”, describing it
as a “fable on solitude” that charts the “physical and psychological
transformation” of Sam. The unspoken subtext of her review is the need to
counter the long history – in France as elsewhere – of dismissive contempt for
genre cinema, or at best its boxing-up into the “instantly forgettable
entertainment” category. In this context, a little dose of art can go a long
way, especially on the film festival circuit as a bridge to commercial release
… as we have seen in the French precedent of Julia Ducournau’s
attention-getting Raw (2016), and in Australia with
cases like Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014).
By the same token, The
Night Eats the World is clearly aimed at the international market for
popular genre films. In its making, Rocher and producer Carole Scotta revived a
procedure little used since the earliest days of the talkies: everything was
filmed in both French and English, resulting in two different final versions (I
am reviewing the English-language one). When Josef von Sternberg shot The Blue Angel in this manner in 1930, alternating English
and German for dual markets, he sometimes had to replace particular cast
members on each take; it’s little wonder that dubbing became the international
norm in subsequent decades. As Rocher points out, his case was relatively
simple: not much dialogue, and two main actors (Danielsen Lie and Iranian star
Golshifteh Farahani from Jim Jarmusch’s overrated Paterson [2016]) fluent in both languages. I wonder whether, in our
current age of International TV, we are likely to see further attempts at
multi-lingual shoots in this fashion.
The art/horror combo in The Night Eats the World cannot entirely disguise its inevitable
problems of structure. Certain scene ideas are listlessly repeated without much
development: Sam’s musical experiments, his rummaging through neighbours’
possessions, his manic outbursts and – clumsiest of all – his soliloquies
addressed to the locked-up, mute Lavant (“I was out of line to talk to you like
that”). It sometimes seems as if the action moves forward solely through the
shock device of noisy interruptions: crashing and banging sounds divert our
hero in the midst of sleeping, dreaming, showering or listening to nostalgic
old audiocassettes.
Despite the welcome complication introduced, over an
hour into this 94 minute film, by the introduction of Farahani as Sarah – a
character who moves from roof to roof, optimistically searching for “a place
away from all this shit”, rather than shutting herself indoors like Sam –
Rocher really has no place to land, ultimately, other than the typically open,
each-way-bet ending that many apocalyptic tales employ.
But it’s certainly intriguing,
along the way, to gauge how The Night
Eats the World tries to juggle the twin obligations of dramatic, artistic
depth and a spectacular, horror-genre surface.
© Adrian Martin May 2019 |