Carnage Movie Review:


With echoes of Almodovar, filmmaker Gleize creates a colourful and rather outrageous ensemble drama for her first feature. But unlike Almodovar it's also somewhat pretentious. Five stories are connected by a young bullfighter (Lescarret) injured in the ring in southern Spain while a young girl named Winnie (Molinier) watches on TV in northern France. Each story unfolds in France as parts of the bull are distributed: The eyes go to a scientist (Gamblin) whose wife (Lio) is hugely pregnant; the horns go to a lonely taxidermist (Sens) who lives in a trailer with his mum (Gorintin); a bone goes to a huge dog kept in a small apartment by Winnie's parents (Bongard and Even); and a steak is served to a startled woman (Molina) having dinner with her teacher daughter (Sanchez). Meanwhile an actress (Mastroianni) is in a kind of living bullfight, looking for work and fighting for her life, then meeting a strange man (Cornillac) who helps her make sense of it.

Yes, there's a very heavy dose of fatalism here--the intertwining of birth and death, the circle of life, and so on. And while it's played out intriguingly through each of the plot threads, Gleize lays it all on a bit thickly with surreal sequences and sudden moments of contrived action that continually catch us off guard. It's beautifully filmed and laced with black humour (much of it is laugh-out-loud funny, and intentionally so), and the performances are excellent all around. But it's so off-beat that it's impossible to connect emotionally with the characters--they're fascinating symbols we watch because we're intrigued by what the filmmaker might to do them next. We never care about them at all. And as a result, the film feels indulgent, far too long and, yes, very French in the way it continually bats themes around without ever really dealing with anything. But while it lasts you can't take your eyes off the screen! And the ideas will swirl in your head long after the lights come up.

Rich Cline

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