Melancholy body

Xzavier 2022-01-04 08:02:34

At last year's Cannes Film Festival, French director Julia Ducounau's debut feature film "Raw" (Raw) shined, and immediately swept multiple film festival awards.

"Raw Eat" has a number of anecdotes on the show, which hype the audience vomiting or even fainting when they leave the scene or watch the movie, requiring an ambulance to be there. In some places, theaters even rationed vomit bags in a targeted manner, so as to protect the vigor of the film so intimately. It is classified as a horror film, and the censorship level has also reached the restricted level. A so-called horror movie about coming of age is so entertained that it really makes people "finger sway" at it.

"Eat Raw" tells the story of the seventeen-year-old vegetarian girl Justina who awakened her carnivorous appetite for some reason in the veterinary school, and even had an uncontrollable desire for human flesh, triggering a bloody crime and her self-recognition growth. story. This "Girl Hannibal" story is not about revenge, but to a certain extent, it can be said that it is indeed about revenge-revenge on fatalism, revenge on the dark side of the heart.

Justina grew up in a strict vegetarian family, and her mother strictly forbidden her to consume even one or two meats. However, the lack of animal protein did not prevent the girl from becoming a schoolmaster. She was admitted to the veterinary school where her parents had studied and her sister Alexia was studying. As a freshman, she and all the other first-year classmates were forced to accept the bullying behaviors of novices from the seniors. The bloody head like "Carrie Witch" is nothing. The rabbit kidney is Gustina's heavy nightmare.

This rabbit kidney not only caused a severe allergic reaction to Gustina, but also caused her eating meat experience to burn into a distorted desire for raw food and even human flesh. She ate a large amount of her hair in a trance, squatted in front of the refrigerator in the middle of the night to bite a raw chicken breast, and ate the bloody fingers of her sister who was accidentally cut by scissors; she watched the muscular body shed nosebleeds , Biting off the lower lip of the male student’s kiss, and trying to eat each other while lusting with roommates... She changed from a ignorant girl to a sexy woman, but she didn’t sing what Grandma Madonna sang in Girl Gone Wild. That's so vivid and fragrant.

Justina became a bloodthirsty witch, but the witch on trial was not Justina, but sister Alexia. It turns out that my sister, like my sister, had a distorted carnivorous behavior a long time ago. What's more, she has long lost control, let alone being indifferent to the fact that her finger was eaten by her sister. . She also extended her fangs to her sister and her roommate. The former became her plaything for bullying in front of her classmates, while the latter was directly killed and eaten. She eventually lost her humanity, so she was also punished by law.

According to the Bechdel Test, "Raw Eat" is a movie that can be watched because it first appears in at least two actresses in the film, and they have names; secondly, there is a dialogue between these actresses; again, the theme of the dialogue Men are not involved (the Bayesian test believes that movies that do not meet these three criteria all involve sex discrimination, so there is no need to watch them). Due to the strong image of female characters and the gender of the director, "Raw Eat" is inevitably regarded as a feminist film.

But it is called a feminist film in a big way, and even simply saying that "Raw Eat" is a horror film, it is probably lost in general. Not to mention, as literary critics have said, flaunting feminism is often nothing more than constructing a persecuted female role to complete the argument based on one's own needs. According to the director's own statement, what she is concerned about is actually a general humanity issue: what does it mean to be a human being?

This question really transcends the barriers of gender. In order to prevent it from becoming empty, Julia Ducono gave it a form of expression, that is, the awakening of (female) sexuality, and resorted to the taboo of civilization—cannibalism—to cleverly collect it. It belongs to the object of the body.

The physical body is the most direct and effective performance prop in "Raw Eat". The body on the screen is stared at, lusted, and even eaten; our body under the screen is vomiting, fainting, or angry. It can strongly induce empathy, forcing the audience to experience—although not necessarily identify—the character’s situation in a physiological response.

However, the director is not blindly pursuing bloody spectacles. Ducono himself pointed out that the content that most triggers physical empathy is not cannibalism/homicide, but more common scenes, such as waxing and hair removal, vomiting, or the sisters trying to pee standing on the top floor. Including scenes of gay roommates masturbating, these designs unambiguously point to desire, ethics, and the flesh, presenting a way of life, in contrast to the death represented by scenes such as eating meat and cutting animal carcasses.

Or to borrow Freud’s terminology, Gustina’s outburst of cannibalism is the result of an imbalance between life instinct and death instinct. From this perspective, the universal meaning of "Eat Raw" is even more obvious. Out of the desire for belonging, Justina chose to endure the unhealthy new-born bullying ritual and chose to imitate her sister. Under her guidance, her lust was overwhelmed by the desire for destruction and moved to the edge of distortion. But at the moment when she was about to lose control, she refused to give in to desire and pulled herself back into the realm of reason—especially by biting herself

What symbolizes Giustina's coming-of-age ceremony is not the awakening of carnivorous desire/sexual consciousness, but rather her own suppression of this animality. If the vegetarian precepts formed by the family have caused some kind of deficiency and some kind of fatalism, then finally refusing to become a sister-like ogre means her real growth. This is different from her previous discipline and repression, but her reconciliation of desire and reason, and her grasp of the scale of human nature.

Levi Strauss, a French structuralist anthropologist who has studied the dichotomy of raw food/cooked food, has also conducted in-depth research on cannibalism. In a field survey of primitive tribes in South America, he introduced a ritual meaning of cannibalism: eating a part of the enemy's body to achieve the dual role of destroying the enemy and internalizing its power.

At the end of "Raw Eat", the sisters fight and bite each other, and it is discovered that Justina found out that her sister had killed her roommate, and suppressed her anger without killing her sister. This just shows that Giustina is no longer the ignorant girl trying to imitate her sister in pursuit of belonging. She has absorbed the power of internalizing her sister; biting herself also means that she has tamed the dark side of her heart and established her own. human nature. The audience also has reason to believe that Justina can truly overcome this animality and revenge against this distorted desire, as the father of the last sister said.

Although the audience may still accuse the narrative strategy of cannibalism to be extreme (a female ogre may also be abominable in the eyes of vegetarians or even some feminists), we must agree that it does effectively foreground the body. , Highlighting the issue of human love of life and death. Therefore, "Eat Raw" can truly break free from narrow labels such as genre movies or feminism, and point to a universal and definite issue of the human condition.

In addition to such an in-depth narrative design, the audiovisual language of the film is equally wonderful. Whether it is scene scheduling, scene application or soundtrack, they all show the level of super debut, and even David Lynch's temperament.

Du Knoo once said in an interview that the coming-of-age ceremony is such a turning point in life, it makes people question themselves through changing body integrity. It does not only occur during adolescence, but can also occur during the first pregnancy, first parenthood, beginning to decline or even the beginning of menopause. According to the director's prompt, if "Eat Raw" makes you physically uncomfortable, that is the time to start thinking. We might as well take a vomit bag, let us face the human body, face our love of life and death.

This article was first published on the WeChat public account of "Iris" movie magazine June 22, 2017

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Extended Reading

Raw quotes

  • Le père: I'm sure you'll find a solution, honey.

  • Justine: [to Alexia] You taste like curry.