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The Untamed
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“Do you like sex?” – “Don’t we all?” That pointed
brother-sister exchange in The Untamed could provide a simple but direct and perfectly accurate summation of the
cinema of Amat Escalante. His films deal with other things as well – violence,
corruption, power, social class – but sexuality is truly at the heart of
everything. The two faces of sex, at least according a certain narrative-cinema
lineage that takes in Stanley Kubrick, Bertrand Bonello and Escalante’s
comrade-mentor in Mexico, Carlos Reygadas: there is civilised sex, precariously
maintained; and primitive sex – the primitive level to which we humans can very
easily and swiftly descend (for good or for ill, that remains to be seen).
In The Tree of
Life (2011), Terrence Malick took us from the cosmos to earth-bound ancient
dinosaurs and modern-day kids at play. The
Untamed, from its very first images and sounds, traces a different kind of
circuit: an asteroid in space, and then a woman in a cabin room, still feeling
the waves of sensual pleasure from her encounter with a fleetingly glimpsed,
slithery-type octopus creature. (If you’re immediately flashing onto Possession [1981], that evocation is
deliberate: Andrzej Żuławski [1940-2016] is
among the film’s dedicatees.)
I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn that this alien
creature, as plot device or thematic metaphor, did not yet appear in several
initial script drafts of the project (the director is the sole screenwriter
here). Escalante started by elaborating a character network that suggests
naturalistic melodrama, or perhaps more accurately a cranked-up telenovela soap opera: Alejandra (Ruth
Ramos) is unhappily married to Ángel (Jesús Meza), who regularly makes homophobic
cracks about her gay brother, medical practitioner Fabián (Eden Villavicencio).
The dark secret that will ultimately unravel the larger family network is that
Ángel and Fabián are in fact having a torrid affair (as is, less scandalously
and more discreetly, Alejandra herself, with a hippie-ish American guy who only
figures on the periphery of the plot). A fourth character is introduced from
the outset (she’s the woman in the opening sequence) who both creates a new
kind of weave between the three others, and draws them away to another,
stranger destiny: Verónica (Simone Bucio).
Verónica was, one day, attracted to that cabin in the
woods in Guanajuato where an older couple (played by Oscar Escalante and
Bernarda Trueba) lovingly tend to the needs of the asteroid space creature. This
alien has very little on its mind, it seems, beyond pleasuring and being
pleasured: it shows no signs of wanting to conquer this world, to reproduce
itself (the possibilities of impregnation and propagation are never raised), or
to make contact with anybody on any level other than the sexual. This is a
passive alien who merely leaves traces, and thickly infects the atmosphere (conjured
in landscape shots and mysterious camera movements): particularly the crater
where it fell to earth, which has become (as revealed in a memorably nutty
scene) a fornication-grotto stomping-ground for all nearby animals, bugs and
birds! The creature seemingly never even wants to leave its minimalistic
room-lodging, instead just hanging out (literally) by winding itself around the
rafters. So it’s not Annihilation (Alex Garland, 2018) territory – whether annihilation/absorption of the human
race by the alien, or plain annihilation in the reverse case.
The alien lair is a setting that – even in the
promotional poster and trailers for the film – will evoke, for some, Claire
Denis’ chilling Bastards (2013). But The Untamed is not about taboo,
political corruption, or even the breakdown of civilised mores. At most, it is
about the old Eros and Thanatos dance, as filtered through Georges Bataille and
others of his ilk: desire demands sacrifice, orgasmic sex can tip over into acts
of violence, or – in the rather more banal way in which Escalante discusses
this in interviews – sex is a drive that routinely surpasses its fulfilment,
and demands either variety or (as in the immortal Bruce Springsteen lyric)
“maybe something worse”.
In truth, there’s not much deep logic to the desiring
ways of this creature. We don’t know why it bites one and kills another, while
only pleasuring somebody else. We don’t know its relation to its elder hosts
(except that its presence seems to make them mighty horny). We don’t know if it
ever evolves or changes – beyond, that is, needing new partners/victims. It’s
not a military extermination story (thankfully), as so many SF-horror pieces
become; but the lack of plot direction or resolution on any level leaves the
creature dangling as purely a handy conceit or metaphor.
And what is it a metaphor for,
exactly? Quite simply, unacknowledged desire, unconfessed desire, unmanageable
desire, successfully neither sublimated nor desublimated – ashamed gayness, for instance, publicly expressing
itself as homophobia on the one hand, and twisting itself into hysterical domestic
violence on the other hand. Escalante seems still stuck, at the end, for a way
to really narrativise that issue of thwarted desire through the SF device.
Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016), on a different but
related register, did a better, semantic-switch-hitting job with this kind of
metaphor-driven plot.
I greatly admired Escalante’s Los Bastardos (2008) for its Michael Haneke-style formalism,
realism and conceptual punch. The Untamed is relatively flat by comparison, perhaps as a result of the need to stylise
the general ensemble around a few – but central – digital effects (handled,
technically, by the Danish side of the co-production agreement), and the loose horror-SF
premise. Only a few choice moments – such as the view of Ángel behind bars,
while in the same frame a police interrogator repeats every word of testimony
to a typist – pop out of the sameness. The realm of the domestic or working everyday
doesn’t really touch ground here, beyond a few felicitous details; and the
non-professional actors, lacking a fuller naturalistic framework, come across
in many scenes as impoverished TV soap figures, sleepwalking through the usual
marital recriminations and familial confrontations (the various parents of the
central characters are particularly thinly sketched).
The film is full of kids and animals, underfoot
everywhere. But neither the kids (standing for the weight and bother of
everyday family life) nor the animals (nearer in spirit to the alien guest)
amount to very much, alas. Another, more novel indication of the human
“multitude” fills the end credits: every single extra who appeared in the film,
whether gifted with a line of dialogue or not, is named and listed. That’s
democracy in action!
MORE Escalante: Lost in the Night © Adrian Martin March 2019 |
