![]() Justine’s (and with this, there are shades of Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia”) plate of mashed potatoes seems to have a meatball in it. The tension mounts when they stop for lunch. ![]() There are already hints of Michael Haneke’s middle-class angst here, with the wife seeming to be fawning over the husband, leaving the daughter somewhat alone. The scene then switches to Justine traveling with her overbearing parents, and in the close space of the car, it is clear all is not well. “Raw,” then, will be the back story of how the girl got to be there. Here’s a girl who has hunted down “raw” flesh and is about to get her quarry. It doesn’t take a minute, but Ducournau has already told a whole story, particularly when coupled with the film’s English title. “Raw” opens with a wide shot of the French countryside where a slim figure in the distance seems to cause a car crash willingly and then walks toward the bungled-up vehicle. For those of us, it is a film to be enjoyed on a small screen. It would be a pity if those interested in contemporary France missed out on it, because, they, like me, think the horror genre to be a no-go area. The title is a pretty accurate description of how I was feeling by the end.To understand what charmed the Cannes jury in Julia Ducournau’s “Titane,” one can turn to her 2016 film “Grave” (“Serious”), publicized in English as “Raw,” possibly to attract horror film lovers with a darker name, and even suggest a kinship with the successful series “Saw.” There is, indeed, much sawing of flesh in this film, however, the atmosphere immediately invites a metaphorical and political reading. Cannibalism becomes Justine’s own initiation into adulthood. And vet school – so apparently innocuous – is a place where you have to get used to the horror of animal flesh. Just as in Abel Ferrara’s vampire horror The Addiction, college is an arena of fear: a sense that your entire sense of self is dissolving as you have to find your way in a new adult world of previously unsuspected menace, unsure if what people are making you do is normal or an outrage. It is with Adrien that she goes to truck stops to eat the kind of glutinous sandwiches she can’t get in the college canteen, and there they meet a sinister livestock haulier – a cameo for the Belgian director and actor Bouli Lanners – who has creepy things to say about the similarity of pig and human flesh. Instead, college and adulthood seems more like a fascistic world of submission and staying in line – or even like some post-apocalyptic society in which these freaky cult rituals have grown up as part of survival.īut she finds friendship and perhaps something more with her roommate Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella), who has been assigned to her despite her request for a woman he breezily assures her he is gay, which as far as the college authorities are concerned is the same thing. Going to university was an experience which Justine had probably thought would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to find herself, to express herself, to find her individuality and personality. Students are brutally woken in the middle of the night: humiliated, bullied, assured that not to submit would be to wimp out and let everyone down. The scenes showing the frat-type “hazing” are extraordinary and very convincing – as if studying to be a vet is like joining the Foreign Legion. What is very impressive about Raw is that absolutely everything about it is disquieting, not just the obvious moments of revulsion: there is no let up in the ambient background buzz of fear. Yet meekly aware of the need to fit in, she does it she suffers a reaction for which the doctor suggests fasting and all this somehow triggers a whole new yearning. So she is horrified by a student initiation ritual in which she has to eat a rabbit kidney. Justine is a virgin, an idealistic person, a believer in animal rights and above all a vegetarian. Justine (Garance Marillier) is a teenager heading off to college to study veterinary science: her sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) is already there, doing the same course a year ahead, and it becomes clear that her doting, protective parents (played by Laurent Lucas and Joana Preiss) took their own degrees there many years before. And in a society where eating is somehow criminalised, cannibalism is an appropriate fantasy. It’s a film in which the lead character is briefly aware of becoming more attractive by losing weight – not so long after she had participated in a jokey student conversation about monkeys being sexually assaulted and then getting anorexia and having to see a therapist. While it isn’t exactly true to say that cannibalism is just a metaphor for something else, eating human flesh is appropriate for a drama about sexuality, identity, body image and conformity.
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