Wen 丨 Wu Zeyuan
Eating human flesh raw? People and cars making love? Stun the audience?
When you search for the name of giulia di Kuno ("Titanium", "Raw")," the first thing that pops up is probably the above keyword. This may well make you think of her as a director who thrives on a large-scale plot, or a neurotic director like Russ von Trier, Nicolas Wending Reyvern, and Gaspard No.
But is this really the case with Di kuno? In fact, this woman, who was slightly shy at the film festival awards ceremony, did not have the same flamboyant temperament as the crazy people above. And in terms of works, yes, her films can scare the audience, but that's not all of them.
Another part of the charm of Di Kuno movies is that they are very solid films in themselves. They have a delicate portrayal of the characters' hearts, emotions and interactive relationships, as well as empathy for the "alien" that cannot be tolerated in society.
By looking back at her first feature film, Raw Food, which also shined in Cannes, we can see these qualities more clearly.
Eat Raw (2016)
Fishy stories of growth and family
The plot premise of the movie "Raw Eating" is difficult not to let the heart-fragile audience retreat. Because it tells a true story about "cannibalism":
The protagonist, Giustina (Garrance Mariglier), was born into a seemingly conformist Middle-Class French family. Her parents, both veterinarians, had prepared her well for her knowledge early on, while her sister Alexia (Ella Langf) was also enrolled in veterinary school. This made her come to the same school naturally, and the prospect of life was like an open and straight road, stable and reliable, lacking in surprises.
But the Veterinary College has its own set of ridiculous rules: as newcomers, Giustina and her classmates had to be bullied by the seniors during the first years of enrollment. Their mattresses and sofas were thrown out of the bedroom windows, and they were often forcibly dragged to parties late at night by the seniors, unable to rest properly; they were splashed with horse blood while collectively receiving lecture from the seniors, and the seniors were not allowed to wash the blood or change the outer clothes until the end of the seniors' inspection of the new students.
All these tortures are still within giustina's acceptance. The only thing that bothered her was another test for seniors: asking freshmen to swallow uncooked animal offal.
Giustina, who grew up in a vegetarian family, was naturally very repulsive to this. She asked her sister for help for this. But instead of helping her, her sister shoved the rabbit's internal organs into Giustina's mouth. The sister's reason is to let the sister learn to obey and follow the flow, and not to appear out of place with the collective.
But the sister did not expect that the choice she made changed her sister's life:
Giustina's bloodline with Alexia originally contained the genes of a cannibal. That piece of rabbit offal completely activated Giustina's appetite for human flesh, and also made her parents fail in protecting her for many years. Once Giustina opened the meat, there was no going back.
"Raw Eating" does have a lot of shots that challenge the audience's endurance. The pouring rain of blood, the suddenly broken fingers, the passages where Giustina nibbled on the broken fingers of others, and the living flesh that had been eaten by her sister to expose the bones.
But what really impresses about "Raw Eating" is not these large-scale scenes, but the film's meticulous portrayal of Giustina's situation and the relationship between the sisters:
Giustina's self-discovery is actually a clichéd fable of growth. She thinks she is an ordinary person, and she is about to enter a path of ordinary people, and even in order to cram herself into the mold of ordinary people, she will not hesitate to violate her body and heart, just to be invisible in the crowd.
But when she found that she was not ordinary, the situation she faced was actually more painful than when she was ignorant. Physical and almost animalistic instincts drive her to evil, while soul and humanity supervise and control her. She was torn apart by these two drives and nearly collapsed.
However, compared with her sister who liberated her nature and went hunting for drivers on the country roads, Giustina was still closer to civilization after all. Between being physically tortured and actively hurting others, she would rather choose the former and maintain her own human bottom line.
Even so, there is still real love between her and her sister. They are bound by blood, defined by the same environment of growth, and although they often quarrel, fight, jealousy, and dislike each other, they still rely on and help each other, trying to find a way out for each other in the world.
All these delicate brushstrokes make "Raw Eat" less like a bloody piece of raw meat, but a bit like a pot of stew simmered slowly. Its script structure is regular, the character arc is clear, and the psychological level of the characters is also as beautiful as the marble pattern of snowflake beef, which is both fat and thin.
Perhaps, the only destructive element of "Raw Eating" is an attempt to humanize the cannibals, a group that is regarded as taboo by all mainstream movies, so that the audience can empathize with their desires and pain (although the cannibals in "Raw Eat" are replaced by vampires, the whole story probably holds up as well).
In Titanium, the second feature film that just won the Palme d'Or, Di Kuno will probably push this destructive force even further. The film still has a character named Giustina and a character named Alexia, and Giustina is still played by Garance Marilyer.
Titanium (2021)
Unlike Raw Eat, the character named Alexia becomes the protagonist in Titanium, having sex with a car, oil flowing from his veins, and using his half-steel body to rumble over all the lewd men who have inappropriate thoughts about her. In contrast, the character named Giustina became a supporting role.
This may indicate that Di Cuno will abandon reason and superego in his new work, and rush more indulgently towards madness and instinct.
Calm Madness: French Cronenberg in The Upbringing?
Di Kuno was the first female director to enjoy the Palme d'Or exclusively. And her award this time is related to the quality of the work, related to gender identity, and also related to the identity/gender/sexual mobility she emphasizes in her works.
As early as "Raw Eating", she deliberately blurred the protagonist's sexual orientation. Giustina's sexual orientation in the film is unclear, and her only sexual behavior is with her gay honey roommate, and the relationship between the two is not so much love as a new relationship that combines friendship, affection and love.
In "Titanium", the identity of the protagonist is even more indistinguishable, hermaphroditic. When Alexia was a woman, she dressed neutrally and her sexual orientation was markedly similar to that of the same sex. And when she disguises herself as a boy to avoid being pursued, the relationship between "him" and Vincent, a firefighter who mistakes "him" for her long-lost son, also reveals ambiguity and danger.
The ambiguity and fluidity of gender/sexual orientation is a topic that French art films love to discuss today. The two directors who regularly make the Film Handbook's annual list, Bertrand Montiger and Jan Gonzalez, are representatives of this type of creation. And their masterpieces "Wild Boys", "Midnight Carnival" and "Thorn Heart" are also amazing works that explore the changing gender identity.
Wild Boys (2017)
But the work of Muntiger and Gonzalez seems to be more aesthetically exclusive. They are deeply influenced by the writings of William Burroughs and the horror and erotic films of the 70s/80s, their visual style is tricky and strange, and in their gorgeous tone, they are more hedonistic temperament belonging to the clumsy children.
Di Kuno's creative approach is more down-to-earth than theirs. Her family was well-off, but apparently not aristocratic: her father was a dermatologist and her mother was a gynecologist. She received an orthodox French film education: she studied screenwriting at La Fémis, France's highest film school. This also provides an explanation for the actual unconventional script structure of "Raw Eating".
In fact, judging from the first two works, Di Kuno's personal interest is closer to that of the Canadian film master David Cronenberg. They are also interested in the mutation of the body: Giustina's rash skin after contact with the internal organs of animals in "Raw Eating" is hard not to think of Cronenberg's "Fly Man";
They are equally interested in cold and eccentric sex. "Titanium"'s obsession with cars and nude women, as well as the setting of the human-car love scene, are undoubtedly deeply influenced by Cronenberg's "Desire Express".
Di Kuno did not shy away from reverence for Cronenberg. She once said that the experience of watching Cronenberg's films at the age of 16 has important shaping significance for her personality: "There is an overwhelming beauty in Konenberg's films. But I realized that not everyone can capture and realize this beauty."
On a visual level, Di Kuno is undoubtedly trying to replicate the horror beauty of Cronenberg. Thematically, like Cronenberg, Di Kuno seems to believe in both physical determinism and deeply bewildered by the eternal struggle and tearing between flesh and spirit. The tension provided by this struggle drives the central conflict of Di Kuno's films.
If "Raw Eating" is just a mature play on the horror/vampire genre conventions, then "Titanium" has pushed Di Kuno's aesthetic process forward by virtue of its visual brilliance and the thematic level of horror. But that may not be enough for a top creator.
After winning the Palme d'Or, Di Cuno's next work is bound to be highly anticipated. Can she, like Cronenberg, build a unique philosophical outlook and world perception based on solid film skills; or even further, can she put aside Cronenberg's influence and truly become a school of her own?
If she could do it, the doors of the temple of cinematic art would be open to her.