EIFF Review: Vinyan

Submitted by K H Brown on Mon, 29 Jun '09 9.48pm
Image
Rating (out of 5)
3
Show info
Company
Backup Films
Production
Fabrice Du Welt (director and writer), Oliver Blackburn (writer)
Performers
Rufus Sewell (Paul Behlmer), Emmanuelle Beart (Jeanne Behlmer), Julie Dreyfus (Kim)
Running time
96mins

Or Emmanuelle [Beart] and the Last Cannibals?

Horror films have never been that big in the Francophone world. One suspects
that the reason, besides the competing discourse of the fantastique, is
that they are seen as somewhat déclassé, not serious enough.

As such, Fabrice Du Welt’s previous genre entry Calvaire / The Ordeal was especially welcome for being an intelligent yet unpretentious all-out anti-fantastique horror film.

Sadly
the director’s new venture, made in English with an eye on the larger
marketplace, proves a disappointment. Maybe it’s mis-marketing, that
it’s less a horror film than a character study and an exploration of
loss, but if so it’s also a piece of marketing that drew me to see it
with expectations that were not fulfilled.

The set-up is simple,
and exploitative of real-world tragedy: In the 2004 Tsunami,
aid-workers Jeanne and Paul Behlmer lost their son Joshua. Six months
later at a fund-raising event Jeanne thinks she sees him in a video
surreptitiously recorded across the Burmese border and convinces Paul
that they should go find the child. He agrees to the expedition, less
from hope than the prospect that failure will give his wife a sense of
closure.

The problem is equally simple: Besides being a distaff version of Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now in the jungle rather than Venice, there’s really nowhere left for the
narrative or the filmmakers to go once the expedition has gotten under
way, except towards the inevitable.

Vinyan – a title which refers to lost souls or spirits – is dominated by two visual styles.

The
first, seen in the pre-expedition scenes in Phuket, Thailand, is
expressionistic-impressionistic man-over-nature stylisation, with
obvious symbolic use of red in the manner of its ‘official’ model and
the ‘unofficial’ likes of Dario Argento’s Suspiria. (Cinematographer Benoit Debie, who first came to prominence through his work for Argento-fan Gaspar Noe, later shot Argento’s The Card Player). It works.

The
second, seen in the jungle scenes in Thailand and Burma, is
naturalistic nature-overwhelming green inferno-ism, with minimal
ability to use red, is more reminiscent of an Italian cannibal film. It
also works, with greater qualifications.

But – that BIG but –
there’s little connection nor segue between them. The characters are
first in one environment then the other. What thus emerges is that the
former was one which could be controlled by the filmmakers, whereas the
latter is one that – an impressive Tenebre-style
crane shot in a ruined temple possibly an exception, depending on the
degree of post-processing trickery involved – could only be endured and
responded to.

Beart and Sewell do their best, but their characters’ relationship lacks the sexual(ised) tension of their counterparts in Don’t Look Now,
with more T&A from Beart (and / or Julie Dreyfus) also being needed
if the film is to work qua (s)exploitation and more cannibal splatter
if it to work as an exercise in gore.

The denouement, with its (s)mothering maternal monster and white goddess allusions to the likes of Mountain of the Cannibal God and Zombie Holocaust also proves more laughable than anything else. “The horror, the horror,” indeed...

In sum Vinyan is a film which, contra Calvaire, sees pretension override generic intelligence.