Dance girl dance

Philippe Grandrieux's
La Vie nouvelle
(The New Life, 2002)
In this eloquent discussion (and passionate defense) of Grandrieux's second feature,
Adrian Martin examines the controversial French filmmaker's "punk-Sadean view of
the human animal and crumbling social structures".[*]

Since its premiere screenings in late 2002, Philippe Grandrieux's second feature La Vie
nouvelle (The New Life) has been a cause clbre. On its theatrical release in France, it
was savaged by a large number of prominent newspaper and magazine reviewers. But
the film has many passionate defenders, whose responses have been collected in Nicole
Brenez's forthcoming book La Vie nouvelle: nouvelle vision (Editions Leo Scheer,
2004).
Grandrieux's work plunges us into every kind of obscurity: moral ambiguity, narrative
enigma, literal darkness. La Vie Nouvelle presents four characters in a severely
depressed Sarajevo who are caught in a mysterious, death-driven web: the feckless
American Seymour (Zach Knighton), his mysterious companion (lover? friend?
brother? father?) Roscoe (Marc Barb), the demonic Mafioso Boyan (Zsolt Nagy), and
the prostitute-showgirl who is the exchange-token in all their relationships, Mlania
(Anna Mouglalis).
Eric Vuillard's poetically conceived script takes us to the very heart of this darkness
where sex, violence, betrayal and obsession mingle and decay. Grandrieux feels freer
than ever to explore the radical extremes of film form: in his lighting and compositions
and impulsive camera movements; in the bold mix of speech, noise and techno/ambient
music (by the celebrated experimental group Etant Donns); and in the frame-by-frame
onslaught of sensations and affects.
Like Grandrieux's brilliant and groundbreaking debut feature Sombre (1998),[1] La Vie
nouvelle explores a punk-Sadean view of the human animal and crumbling social
structures; far more than Sombre, it has divided audiences and ignited rejection from an
affronted critical mainstream. But its advocates believe that this extreme cinema,
founded on a philosophic investigation of evil, is also a blow for avant-garde liberty.
Pulsating filmmaking

The films of Philippe Grandrieux pulsate.

They pulsate microcosmically: in the
images, the camera trembles and flickers
so violently that, even within a single,
continuous shot, no photogram resembles
another. And they pulsate
macrocosmically: the soundtrack is
constructed globally upon unidentifiable,

layered, synthesised, ambient noises of breath or wind, sucked in and expelled, which
underlie the entire film and constitute its disturbed heartbeat, returning to our ear when
all other sounds have disappeared. In the very beginnings and endings of his films, over
the credits, there is nothing but this strangely bodily sound.
And then there are the pulses of music and dance. Grandrieux's films are severely
mutated musicals. There is even a song delivered in a seedy Sarajevo nightclub by Anna
Mouglalis in La Vie nouvelle, reminding us of the spaced-out performances of Isabella
Rossellini in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) and Asia Argento in Abel Ferrara's New
Rose Hotel (1998). The dance music in Grandrieux's films is always driven, anguished.
A robotic techno beat overlaid by punk cries, slurs, growls, murmurs. Trance music, fit
for Jean Rouch's matres fous.
But it is men who are the masters in Grandrieux's spectacles. Boyan in La Vie nouvelle
is lord of the dance: before the disco crowd, he pumps his fist manically into the air.
And more than this: he is the marionette master. Mlania is his puppet. We know
already from Sombre how much intensity and importance Grandrieux invests in images
of control: its hero, in hiding, literally works Punch and Judy dolls to elicit screams of
terror and ecstasy from small children. And so much of the texture of that filmfrom
the disquieting images of cars in ghostly, floating motion to the eerie, disembodied
loudspeaker announcements at outdoor sports eventsevokes a sort of Mabusian
"remote control" of people and a dispossession of their wills.
Women under the influence. In Grandrieux's films, women seek more than the ecstasy
of a trance in their dancing. They are beyond the momentary, transcendental grace of
dance offered to Cassavetes-style heroines like the sad ex-lover (Robin Wright) in Sean
Penn's The Crossing Guard (1995) or the battered wife-and-mother in Gary Oldman's
Nil By Mouth (1997). Or rather, Grandrieux's women seek through that trance-dance to
escape, to violently tear themselves out of their own skins. To leave behind the
impossible contradictions of the intersubjective bind in which they caught, bought and
sold and bartered like slaves, like chattel. Right in the heart of the worst moments
when they are scared, drunk, drugged, on display, menaced from all sides
Grandrieux's women dance. Think of the woman semi-naked in the car headlights in
Sombre or, in the same film, Elina Lwensohn hurling herself about to punk-rockabilly
as she tries to tell her new beast-captor: "I'm in danger".
Danger. Grandrieux is a
filmmaker of the body, but rarely
the
variable space or interval
between bodies, as in Visconti or
Murnau or Mizoguchi. There is
no
space between bodies in
Grandrieux; they are jammed
together in a difficult, fraught
intimacy. All clinches, all
embraces are potentially violent,
charged with the alienness of the
Other
and the terror of negotiating his or her too-close presence. From Boyan's cutting of
Mlania's haira gesture as excruciatingly extended in time as it is collapsed in space
to the terrified inside-out souls lost in subterranean darkness, from the homoerotic

rituals of men greeting and drinking to heterosexual violation and a cannibalistic death:
bodies meet not in ecstatic abandon but on fearful alert.
Mise en scnethe art of bodies in spaceis always, subtly or overtly, a dance, but this
is the dance of death, the living death of everyday power relations. The two scenes of
Mlania's prostitution, one placed directly after the other in Grandrieux's cinema of
cruelty, provide an inventory of bodily postures figuring fright, uncertainty, panic and
stress, a primal, physical language of animals under threat: Seymour's instant post-coital
blues, Mlania's vulnerable nakedness, and the icy upper-body stress of the French
client, who finally withdraws into himself and away from the Other in order to
masturbate in a fuzzy, atomised blur.
There are many women on stage in Grandrieux's filmsshowgirls, gyrating as they
display their sad flesh, draping themselves over men in order to solicit money as they
gaze at themselves vacuously in a mirror (Mlania performs this gesture early in La Vie
nouvelle, exactly as Seymour becomes entranced by his fantasy of her). The trance or
flight offered by dance cannot happen on stage like this, during work hours.
It must happen within the Dionysiac confusion of a crowd that is saturated by music and
noise, fuelled by intoxicating substances, as it does for the wildly dancing women in
Emir Kusturica's Underground (1995) and Black Cat White Cat (1998), women who
party like it's 1999. Yet when does the Grandrieux heroine ever leave the stage,
completely? That is the question posed in the remarkable five-minute dance sequence
towards the end of La Vie nouvelle, shortly before Boyan invites Seymour into the
thermic inferno.
Contriving paradoxes

The sequence develops in stages, closely tied to the progressive layering of tracks in the
techno music mix. It begins in silence, with that ambient wind sound soon entering, plus
a floating, chiming chord every few seconds. In a first phase, the sequence shows us
Boyan caressing Mlania as if to mould her. He is the metteur en scne and the
choreographer here, and he directs his puppet to twirl. As often in La Vie nouvelle,
Grandrieux cleverly contrives unusual, paradoxical effects of speed and movement,
always based on the unexpected and uncanny comparison of different vectors or planes
in the image.
Like the woman who, in the opening shots, remains with eyes wide open while her
companion blinks furiously (it is a fast-motion effect), or the other local inhabitants
who, while in out-of-focus close-up, later seem to glide slowly through the day-lit
landscape on some unseen conveyor belt, here Mlania's spin is irreal: she is clearly on
some rotating disc we do not seea device pioneered by Jean Cocteau in the credits of
La Princesse de Clves (Jean Delannoy, 1961) and extended over an entire film by
Mikls Jancs in A zsarnok szve, avagy Boccaccio Magyarorszgon (The Tyrant's
Heart, 1981)and meanwhile the camera's own circular movement confounds the
spatial and perceptual paradox.
Boyan's hands fan, flutter, guide, caress, mock Mlania. Boyan turns to his own dance
reveriethis is the second phase of the sequence, devoted entirely to shots of him, as a
techno beat and a fast bass pattern on a single note enter. Lighting and posture

(particularly his hunched position as viewed from the back) transform the marionette
master momentarily into a Nosferatu, and images of his face resemble a demon. Then
(phase 3) the scene reintegrates Mlania in her increasingly accelerating choreography.
Two repeating synthesised notes, a tone apart, fill out the musical space between the
bass line and the floating chime-chords. More techno percussion enters, capped off by a
disco high-hat cymbal. Mlania's spinning reaches a frenzy, a crescendo. An inspired
noise effect has also joined the fray: a whooshing, whip-like sound. At first it seems
keyed to Mlania's twirl, but almost instantly it gains a musical, sensorial autonomy,
disengaged from synchronisation with the action.
The sequence, now centring on Mlania, reaches its high point of visual defiguration
(phase 4). The camera shakes so much in response to her dance that her face in close-up
is flattened, stretched, lost, found, from one frame to the next. One can longer tell what
exact gestures she is performing, where she is situated in the room, or even where the
line of her body ends and the surrounding environment begins (a pictorial subversion
common in Grandrieux). If one freezes these frames of her face, arms, neck and
shoulders, a hundred things can be seen or hallucinated, hidden by the dfilement: a
torso, a cloud, an insect, a mask, sexual organs.
In this fury of defiguration, a miracle is performed, a magical and lyrical transport. The
music fades, and there is only, for about five seconds, the whooshing whip sound.
Mlania seems weightless, detached from time and space. She is freed at last. But at a
certain moment, during this movement of her body, there is a subtle transitionfrom
the reddish background of the rehearsal room to bright lights piercing darkness. The
transportation has (although we don't realise this immediately) reversed its direction and
fallen back to earth. Mlania is now in a nightclub. The sound tells us this before the
image: fade up on a cheering crowd, and the return in full force of the techno music.
There is no escape for her.
Now (phase 5) Mlania is again the
centre of attention with Boyan, adored by
a crowd. Their dancing is intense. While
Boyan is certain of his movements,
always in control, Mlania dances to get
out of herselfan impulse conveyed in
her constant violation of, and flight from,
the borders of the compositional frame.
Sudden cut to a sixth and final phase: the
wind-breath sound is prominent, and the
music is only a distant, muffled rumble,
as if in an adjacent room. Mlania has passed out and is held in Boyan's arms. Away
from the crowd (who are glimpsed eerily still in their frenzy, but without the fullness of
their soundtrack), Boyan poses with her limp body, like the Piet, or James Stewart and
Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958). Close-up on Boyan, who looks blankly, then smiles
wickedly and throws his head back to laugh. End of sequence.
Is all this a matter of men and women, fixed gender roles, in Grandrieux's cinema? Not
quite. For, in the generalised and systematic confusion of forms, identities and elements
that is La Vie nouvelle, all gestures are dispersed, shared. Roscoe, too, raises his arms to
dance like Boyan; but he is alone, the master of nothing, and his little pirouettes

anticipate Mlania's frantic, imprisoned spinning. Roscoe and Seymour will also be seen
in Piet-like arrangements. Seymour will be embraced, sculpted, led by Boyan's hands,
just as Mlania has been. And the Francis Bacon-style concentration on Mlania's
upturned neck during her dancing lift-off and set-down links her to Seymour in the final
moments of the film as to the anonymous Sarajevan at in its prologue... La Vie nouvelle,
this "immense clip" of a film (as Raymond Bellour has called it), bound together by
rhythms, pulsations, and screams of horror.