Le Souffle |
| Le Souffle is a boring, pretentious film about a boring,
pretentious adolescent. If it had been set in rural England it would have
been roundly derided for its grotesque caricatures and lack of plot. Luckily,
it's French, so some critics will tell you it's poetic, evocative, and other
words that sidestep the issue of storytelling. Don't be fooled.
The film details a day in the life of David (Pierre-Louis Bonnetblanc), a surly teenager stuck on his uncle's farm for the summer. As the day begins, David and his uncle prepare for a barbecue being held for some of the local men, where David will be allowed to drink for the first time. As the day progresses he gets horribly drunk, and this drunkenness combines with the searing heat and his own latent aggression and frustration, leading to violent and disturbing consequences. However the plot itself isn't too important, as we're not really supposed to believe in or care about any of these characters; they're merely ciphers used by the director to make heavy-handed statements about rural life and adolescence. These points are clear enough, and powerfully conveyed in some cases. We see the brutalising effect of rural life in the lurid gutting of animals, and David's violence. We see this is a broken society, where fathers routinely desert their children, and women seem to play no role at all. And Bonnetblanc gives a strong performance, vividly conveying the intensity of adolescence, exacerbated by the heat and loneliness. Some of the scenes do work on the filmmaker's own terms, then; the problem is that they don't work on ours. There is no real story to speak of, so at only 77 minutes this still feels like a grossly extended short rather than a snappy feature. The characters are both unpleasant and unbelievable, and however much we might sympathise with the pain of adolescence, David is essentially a tedious, arrogant sociopath. The cinematography has also been wildly overpraised, shot in high contrast black and white to remove all beauty and charm from the Limousin countryside. Le Souffle is a film that some will praise, but few will see twice. David Haviland |
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