New Releases: High Tension

Film dubbing is an act of sabotage, worse even than colorization because of the capacity for mischief it introduces. Case in point: a new French horror import that grafts an American voice over one of the main characters, and, I strongly suspect, transfers out French music with American country and jazz whenever the characters switch on radios. The whole business reeks. I think the market research that led to this dubbing decision would make a much more terrifying read than the script for High Tension.

The only thing that I know about the director, Alexandre Aja, is that he is the son of a French film critic and a French film director, so I’m already signed up to see his next six movies. His apparent interest in Europeanizing American genre standards might make for some interesting viewing. I’d like to see the French take on the buddy-cop movie.

High Tension is not exactly a slasher movie in the mold of the Friday the 13^th movies. When a kill is made in those films, it is typically done with a stab at creativity and a dose of bad humor. This film belongs to a somewhat older tradition of what I guess you could call ‘torture movies’ like Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left. The goal of the torture movie is to bring the audience to its knees with depicted sexual battery or emergency-room gore, or both. The first time we see the killer in this movie, he’s receiving oral sex in the cab of his truck from a severed head. To each his own.

There’s hardly any story to speak of. A college girl, Alex, arrives at her country house with a friend, Marie, in tow, and the two have hardly set down bags in the house before a fat trucker barges in and begins killing the occupants, including a toddler. (What is this, Revenge of the Sith?) Alex is then kidnapped by the killer, and it’s up to Marie to free her. By any logic, she would try to get to a neighbor’s phone, use a cell-phone, or otherwise alert the neighbors, but that’s apparently not a possibility. She has to set off in a car.

Is the French countryside really this remote? If so, I guess it’s a natural choice for American-style horror movies. In our horror universe the landscape is usually barren except for gas stations and woods, and in this movie, after the killer slaughters everyone at the country house he proceeds straight to the gas station and then onto the woods. What is it about these locations that makes them desirable for horror films?

I think it’s not just about isolation - it’s also a kind of class thing. In our subconscious, we know that anyone who works at a gas station or hangs out near the woods is not someone we would be comfortable meeting on a dark night. I’d like to commission some Cinematical reader to write a study on this whole issue. And if you have any thoughts on abandoned hospitals, throw those in, too.

The un-kidnapped friend, Marie, is played by Cecile De France, an actress who I’m sure I will be learning more of in about six months, after I’ve graduated from Level 2 of the Rosetta Stone French language program and begin importing large boxes of French films. She has a natural ease with the camera, but I don’t know if she’s playing in the same league as Audrey Tautou or Julie Delpy. With rippling muscles under her sweaty t-shirt, boy’s haircut and penchant for staying two inches from the camera lens, she is supposed to be some kind of 21^st century Renee Flexonetti.

I should also note that early in the film there’s an extended, clothes-on masturbation scene featuring De France. Why? No reason, apparently. It has nothing to do with the rest of the story and seems sort of wedged in between events. I guess that’s just how the French do gratuitousness.

The killer, played by Philippe Nahon, is not totally uninteresting. He drives an ancient army convoy with a big cow-catcher on the front. His face is a bulbous mass of sausage jowls and he squishes whenever he walks; he seems to be of the sea. I suspect that Steven Spielberg’s Duel was a major influence on the creation of his character - especially the way we rarely see him full-on for long periods.

The ending of this film must be commented on, so I’ll tread lightly. It doesn’t make any sense. Not at any level, on any plane of existence, in space or time. (And I didn’t bat an eye over the orbiting homunculus in 2001: A Space Odyssey) Let me put it another way - if the film’s ending is true, then its beginning couldn’t have happened, which means the ending couldn’t have happened. How is the killer’s entrance explainable? What about the other victims? Why the banter with the clerk? What was the entire motivation? Confused? Wait till you see the movie.

I’ve been holding my tongue for the past couple of years about the emergence of the Forget Everything That Came Before films, but now that it’s gone international, I’m ready to declare that this genre must end as quickly as it began, not unlike the epidemic of body-swapping films that we suffered through in the late 80s. The conceit of a FETCB film is narratively lazy. It’s Patrick Duffy in the shower. It causes an already cynical audience to resist having anything more than a purely observational relationship to the characters on-screen. I think we can do better. Qu’est-ce que vous en pensez?