Land Without Bread

As a virtual lifelong loather of the sort of debasing deluded dreams that Hollywood so sickingly sells like a pimp attempting to pass off a seasoned slack-jawed STD-ridden streetwalker as a prized virgin beauty, I have naturally always been more attracted to a sort of realism that borders on the surreal; whether it be Bavarian sensation Werner Herzog’s morosely morbid depiction of infamous necrophile Ed Gein’s hometown in Stroszek (1977), the somehow mystifying yet simultaneously demystifying avant-garde docs of Dutch auteur Henri Plaat (Fragments of Decay, El cardenal), or the hypnotically darkly humorous aesthetically nihilistic excesses of Harmony Korine’s delightfully deranging debut feature Gummo (1997). Needless to say, as both a cinephile and longtime Luis Buñuel fan, I should have probably watched the Spanish auteur’s third film and sole documentary contribution, Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (1933) aka Land Without Bread aka Unpromised Land, a very long time ago, yet I just recently endured it for the first time after being inspired by the animated feature Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles (2018) aka Buñuel en el laberinto de las Tortugas directed Salvador Simó. While I am not a huge fan Simó’s of film—a somewhat superficial and even hagiographic semi-fictional tribute to Buñuel’s personal mein kampf while making Land Without Bread that, at least partly, feels inspired by the troubled Walt Disney-Salvador Dalí collaboration Destino (1945/2008)—it certainly did its job in terms of inspiring me to finally watch the documentary, especially after I watched the extra features included on the Shout Factory blu-ray and discovered the Dutch documentary Buñuel's Prisoners (2000) aka De gevangenen van Buñuel where modern-day descendants of the Spanish region depicted in the doc express both great hatred and loving respect for the Spanish auteur.

Indeed, Buñuel’s 28-minute doc—a pioneering cinematic work that is described as both a ‘pseudo-documentary’ and ‘Ethnofiction’ on Wikipedia yet anticipates cinema-vérité and is surely both more intriguing and subversive than anything Jean Rouch has ever directed—has ultimately proved to be such an influential film that it has inspired multiple documentaries and a virtual children’s animated feature, yet it seems that no one can actually agree on what the film actually is or the auteur's intent in what is arguably a playfully morally dubious experiment in understated cinematic savagery of the delectably distastefully tragicomedic sort where the misery of man is ruthlessly rubbed into the viewer’s face with an almost demonic dispassion. Depicting the everyday destitution and surely surreal poverty of the Las Hurdes region of Spain, the short does the seemingly impossible and equally nonsensical by being a true ‘Surrealist documentary’ that makes a mockery out of the sort of nauseatingly naive proto-Rouch-esque ethnographic racial fetishism associated with frog surrealists like Michel Leiris.  In short, in Land Without Bread, the viewer is shocked to discover that even parts of Europe exhibit the same sort of perturbing sub-Lumpenproletariat impoverishment and almost transcendental backwardness that is typically associated with the Dark Continent.

 As a cinematic work that was directed by one of the greatest filmmakers of all-time, funded by the lottery winnings of an anarcho-syndicalist sculptor-cum-painter named Ramón Acín that was murdered by supposed fascists during the first year of the Spanish Civil War (which, ironically, the film supports the start of!), and co-written by a commie Surrealist named Pierre Unik who died in a concentration camp in 1945, Land Without Bread is undeniably an important piece of both cinema and (meta)political history where the loony leftist idealism of its creators now seems genuinely absurd on retrospect.  In that sense, the film seems even more innately surreal today than when it was first released in what is ultimately a great example of an artist (or, in this case, artists) becoming a victim of his own youthful political naïveté (not surprisingly, Buñuel's political views, or lack thereof, would only become more nuanced and cynical as he aged). Taking its title from a reference by Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin about how every social and political problem can supposedly be cured with mere bread, the film would seem relatively political ambiguous if Buñuel had not later added a sort of patently preposterous postscript that reads: “The generals’ rebellion aided by Hitler and Mussolini would restore together with the privileges of the owners, the peasant workforces. But the works and peasants of Spain will defeat Franco and his accomplices. With the help of anti-fascists all over the world, tranquility and happiness will make way for civil war and forever eradicate the pockets of misery this film has shown you.”

Of course, as everything from intentional Soviet famines like Holodomor to the current starvation plaguing much of Venezuela today, commies are not very good at feeding people—whether it be moldy Bolshevik bread or otherwise. Idiotic youthful idealism aside, the doc was a valiant act of cinematic rebellion and a film that apparently could have gotten Buñuel killed, or as the auteur explained in his memoir My Last Sigh (1982), “When the Republican troops, backed by Durutti’s anarchist column, occupied Quinto, my friend Mantecon, the governor of Aragón, found a dossier with my name on it in the files of the civil guard. In it, I was described as notoriously debauched, a morphine addict, and the author of that heinous film, that crime against the state, LAS HURDES. If I could be found, the note said, I was to be turned over immediately to the Falange, where I would receive my just deserts.”  Of course, Buñuel collaborators Acín and Unik were not so lucky, but such was the spirit of the age as artists were purged from both sides of the political spectrum.  For example, upon France's so-called liberation during WWII, French filmmaker Jean Mamy—a one-time leftist that acted as the editor of Jean Renoir's Baby's Laxative (1931) aka On purge bébé—was executed in part for directing the Vichy anti-Freemasonry propaganda film Occult Forces (1943) aka Forces occultes (in fact, the film's writer Jean Marquès-Rivière and producer Robert Muzard were also sentenced to death, but they both managed to ultimately survive).

 Notably, despite only covering a couple pages of Buñuel’s excellent book, you arguably learn more about the history of Las Hurdes, which the auteur was initially inspired to make a film about after reading the anthropological study Las Jurdes: étude de géographie humaine (1927) by Maurice Legendre, by reading the auteur’s autobiography. As Buñuel explains in My Last Sigh, “Once upon a time, the high plateaus of Las Hurdes were settled by bandits, and by Jews who’d fled the Inquisition,” though one surely would not know that after watching the film as Jews and banditos seem like otherworldly Übermenschen compared to the fiercely forlorn modern-day inhabitants of the region.  In Land Without Bread, the viewer discovers a seemingly endless arid wasteland that is described as follows by narrator Abel Jacquin, “Throughout this labyrinth of mountains…the 52 villages that make up Las Hurdes are scattered…with a total population of 8,000 people. Ahead, we must descend a steep slope…and cross the splendid valley, Las Batuecas…currently inhabited by an old monk who lives here…surrounded by a few servants.” Apparently, for four centuries, the valley was inhabited by monks, the Carmelites, who preached Christianity in the main villages of Las Hurdes, but now the monasteries are completely deserted aside from a sole monk and his handful of loyal servants. Despite the decline of spiritual leaders in Las Hurdes, the nicest buildings in the area are all churches, which surely reminds its lowly inhabitants of their ultimate value in the face of god almighty. In fact, it seems that the only thing these pitiful peasants have is religion as that don’t even really have a folk culture, or as Buñuel explained in his memoir, “As for folk dances, those trite expressions of misplaced nationalism, Las Hurdes didn’t have any.”  Indeed, instead of pesky fascistic volk dances, the area is plagued by roaming packs of rock-throwing inbred mutants, or so one discovers while watching Buñuel's oftentimes organically grotesque yet hardly garish film.

 Due to poverty, malnutrition, poor hygiene and inbreeding, among other things, genetic degeneration in Las Hurdes is a serious problem to the point where the area is plagued with dwarfs and violent mental retards that tend to throw rocks and attack people, including Buñuel’s small film crew.  Indeed, while the auteur's intent is certainly dubious, there is no denying the nightmarish reality of the genetically forsaken sub-troglodytes featured in the film. Naturally, senseless death is also an everyday occurrence in the area, as Buñuel encounters a small little girl lying on the ground that, as the narrator reveals, apparently died only a couple days later after the footage was shot. At one point, the viewer encounters a seemingly elderly woman breast-feeding a baby with her completely deflated bean-bag boobs, only to be told by the narrator that she is actually only 32-years-old (admittedly, I found this claim to be more than a little bit improbable). Most people in the area only have the choice of potatoes and beans as food (with the slightly richer inhabitants occasionally partaking in pork), though, every so often, goat meat becomes available when said livestock accidentally falls off a cliff (for the film, Buñuel did not have time time wait for such an accident so he shot a goat off a cliff himself!). Dysentery is also a big problem in the area as the locals tend to eat unripe cherries out of  sheer desperation. Even death is not easy in the region, as corpses have to be carried many miles as most of the villages lack cemeteries (for these admittedly rather realistic scenes, Buñuel had an infant ‘play dead’ and somehow the fly-plagued babe does a good job acting!). While the primary food industry in the area is beekeeping, the locals do not actually own the bees, thus making it all the more absurd that goats, mules, and people are ofentimes killed by said bees. In short, death seems to be the main concern for the locals of Las Hurdes and, as an old woman says at the very end of the doc, “Nothing keeps you more awake than to think always of the dead. Recite an Ave Maria for the peace of their souls.”  Of course, considering Buñuel’s own staunchly cynical stance on his ancestral faith, the inclusion of the poor wretched old woman's words seems all the more bleak yet simultaneously playfully nihilistic.

 At the end of the film, the narrator less than passionately declares, “After a two-month say in Las Hurdes…we leave the country,” but, as referenced in the documentary The Journey of a Surrealist, Buñuel later remarked, “Once you’ve been to hell, how do you get out?” Cynical exaggeration or not, the doc makes its case with very little effort that Las Hurdes is a miserable virtual pre-medieval hellhole and, as the auteur intended, the idiotic sort of European xenophiles that fetishize African poverty merely need to travel a couple miles to find the ugly extreme of abject of human suffering, just as the white liberal and Judaic intellectuals of today pretend tend to weep for the melanin-privileged people of the world without batting an eye for the poor whites of Appalachia (who, in their disgustingly deluded slave-morality-ridden minds, believe that these poor whites deserve it due to imaginary privilege being part of their magical racial birthright). Rather ironically, despite the film’s contrived commie postscript, Buñuel was later forced to concede to Mexican actor and screen writer Tomás Pérez Turrent that Francisco Franco enriched Las Hurdes, confessing, “Yes, some years ago I went to Las Hurdes. It had changed somewhat because it had become part of Franco’s favorite region. There was electricity in some towns and they made bread everywhere.” In short, ostensible fascist Franco brought bread to the land without bread. Political intent aside, Buñuel felt the doc was part of the same personal Surrealist Weltanschauung as his previous two films Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930), noting, “It’s in the same line. The first two are imaginative, the other is taken from reality, but I feel it shares the same outlook.” Still, the film was distinct to the auteur in at least one way as he stated to José de la Colina, “Nothing is gratuitous in LAND WITHOUT BREAD. It is perhaps the least gratuitous film I have made.” 

 In the worthwhile compilation The Cinema of Cruelty: From Buñuel to Hitchcock (1975), André Bazin noted, “With LAS HURDES (LAND WITHOUT BREAD), a ‘documentary’ on the poverty-stricken population of the Las Hurdes region, Buñuel did not reject UN CHIEN ANDALOU; on the contrary, the objectivity, the soberness of the documentary surpassed the horror and the forcefulness of the fantasy. In the former, the donkey devoured by bees attained the nobility of a barbaric and Mediterranean myth which is certainly equal to the glamour of the dead donkey on the piano. Thus Buñuel stands out as one of the great names of the cinema at the end of the silent screen and the beginning of sound—one with which only that of Vigo bears comparison—in spite of the sparseness of his output.” Indeed, while Land Without Bread does not quite transcend the singular shock of an eye being slit like in Un Chien Andalou (1929), it manages to defile the soul in a striking fashion to the point where death feels like it can be virtually touched and the smell of decay is not too far away, which was surely the auteur’s intent in depicting his homeland as a place of deathly destitution and dystopian delirium where the crucifix is a symbol of death and the legacy of Catholicism is one of starved disease-ridden corpses and perennially smirking retards. While Bazin would also argue in regard to the film, “The documentary on Las Hurdes was tinged with a certain cynicism, a self-satisfaction in its objectivity; the rejection of pity took on the color of an aesthetic provocation,” I personally deeply respect Buñuel—a bourgeois boy that had no real innate personal understanding of the human misery he encountered—for not succumbing to conspicuously contrived bleeding-heart buffoonery by taking the easy gutmensch route and pretending to weep for people that need everything but misspent tears. 

 Notably, at one point in Land Without Bread, Buñuel plays virtual art critic in a scene featuring morbid midgets and mental defectives juxtaposed with the deadly serious narration, “The realism even of a Zurbarán or of a Ribera falls far short of such a reality. The degeneration of this race is primarily due to hunger, lack of hygiene, poverty and incest.” While some might find such sentiments to be as cold as an unclad Icelandic female corpse, I am also reminded of the auteur’s words, “I’ve always believed that the imagination is a spiritual quality that, like memory, can be trained and developed.” After all, only Buñuel could arrive to such a charmingly twisted yet aesthetically truthful conclusion after being confronted with such miserable misbegotten untermenschen that have no time or taste for the bourgeois luxury of fine art. Thankfully, Buñuel did not pull a Forough Farrokhzad who, after finishing her sole film The House Is Black (1963)—a 22-minute doc depicting the horribly disfigured individuals of an Iranian leper colony—decided it would be wise to adopt two leprotic children due to her haunting experiences while working on the film (notably, she died only four years later in a car wreck, thus assumedly leaving those kids orphans once again). The last thing the world needs, especially the cinematic world, is another documentary where we are supposed to feel sorry for poor brown people and thus it comes as a great relief that one of cinema’s greatest and most singular artists created a classic documentary that is the total opposite of the Michael Moore school of ludicrously lame liberal agitprop of the unwittingly shamelessly grotesque sort.  In short, Buñuel was a pinko-leftist the same way German Expressionist poet Gottfried Benn was a National Socialist.

Literal documentary or not, it is hard to imagine Werner Herzog’s underrated second feature Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) without the existence of Buñuel's short doc due to certain striking aesthetic similarities, especially when it comes to the ‘ecstatic truth.’  Although Buñuel would never again direct a documentary, he apparently edited together an abridged version of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) featuring elements of Luftwaffe auteur Hans Bertram's Feuertaufe (1940) aka Baptism of Fire for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), but it unfortunately has never been released. While Buñuel would even demonstrate an apparent antifascist stance in later works like Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), I somehow doubt his MoMA edit of Naziland is as unflattering as his depiction of Las Hurdes in Land Without Bread. After all, as certain wise people sometimes say, you cannot polish a turd but you can certainly polish a Stahlhelm.  Either way, I think it is safe to say that no modern-day leftist would believe the film was made by one of their brethren. As for the poor people of Las Hurdes, thank god that Franco could do what Buñuel’s (or, more literally, André Gide's and Jean Cocteau’s boy toy Marc Allégret’s) camera could not.  Admittedly, while Land Without Bread is one of the Buñuel films that I am least likely to revisit anytime soon, if I am feeling in enough of a masochistic mood to experience very vintage human suffering, I will certainly choose it over French master auteur Alain Resnais' obscenely overrated shoah showcase Night and Fog (1956) aka Nuit et brouillard.  In describing one of his later masterpieces, Manny Farber—the virtual Sam Fuller of film critics—argued in regard to Buñuel, “His glee in life is a movie of raped virgins and fallen saints, conceived by a literary old-world director detached from his actors but infatuated with his cock-eyed primitive cynicism.  It's this combination of detachment and the infatuated-with-bitterness viewpoint, added to a flat-footed technique, that produces the piercingly cold images of THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL.”  Of course, the same could also be said of Land Without Bread but it is exactly Buñuel’s so-called “cock-eyed primitive cynicism” that allows us to face the harsh truth of the dreadfully primitive in a wondefully wicked way that reminds one of the classic Spanish phrase: “¡Viva la Muerte!”

-Ty E

The Moon in the Gutter

Personally, I cannot think of a cooler and more aesthetically appealing film title than The Moon in the Gutter (1983) aka La Lune dans le caniveau and I came to that conclusion years before I actually got around to watching French auteur Jean-Jacques Beineix’s almost grotesquely gorgeous celluloid oddity. As far as I am concerned, the film is associated with one of the biggest tragedies of cinema history in a sad cinematic scenario that rivals Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1924), Tod Browning's London After Midnight (1927), Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Andrzej Żuławski’s On the Silver Globe (1988), and most of gutter auteur Andy Milligan’s early films in terms of a potential masterpiece needlessly succumbing to studio stupidity, negligence and/or petty vindictiveness. Indeed, the French studio, Gaumont Film Company, absurdly and nonsensically (and, apparently, quite illegally) intentionally destroyed Beineix’s original fully-edited 4-hour and a 3-hour versions of the film to supposedly “make space” in the film vaults despite such film reels taking up relatively little space. Apparently, Gaumont, which forced the auteur to cut the film to a mere 137-minute running time (as it exists today, which, according to the filmmaker, apparently destroyed the entire “rhythm” of the film), was so unhappy that the film was such a critical and commercial box-office bomb that they took a sort of symbolic revenge for ostensibly destroying the reputation of the studio by maliciously destroying these two original cuts.  In fact, Beineix, who is still haunted by the nightmarish artistic experience even to this today, only discovered of this great betrayal after assembling a 3-hour director’s cut of his subsequent feature Betty Blue (1986) aka 37° 2 le matin and requesting to give the same special director's treatment to The Moon in the Gutter.

 Still, even as it exists today, the film is, at least in my less than humble opinion, Beineix’s unmitigated magnum opus and one of the greatest masterpieces among flawed masterpieces as the cinematic equivalent of a back-alley opium high where the viewer comes up and down but, not unlike the protagonist, is ultimately left in the same melancholic metaphysical hell as he began. Oftentimes feeling like it is set in a different purgatorial port city of the same narcotizingly artificially-stylized, chthonic Genet-esque cinematic universe as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982)—a film that, incidentally, was also produced by Gaumont in a big studio city—the film is masterpiece of meticulously stylized mise-en-scène where Beineix demonstrates with nil vainglorious CGI visual sophistry the great aesthetic heights of the cinematic form while lavishing the viewer with some less-than-feel-good archetypal truths. One of the key works of the so-called Cinéma du look—a movement that Fassbinder’s later films, including Querelle, aesthetically influenced—the film makes it seem as if the La Nouvelle Vague never existed and that it is merely the gothic/darkwave contribution to the ‘Tradition de qualité’ that the pedantic frogs of the Cahiers du Cinéma so passionately despised.  In short, the film has more to do with Marcel Carné and Jean Cocteau than Godard and Truffaut, though it also seems to be influenced by the most obscure and esoteric of film noir flicks like Arthur Ripley's labyrinthine Cornell Woolrich adaptation The Chase (1946) and John Parker's exceedingly experimental Dementia (1955) aka Daughter of Horror.

 While fiercely French in many ways, The Moon in the Gutter is actually adapted from the 1953 pulp-noir novel of the same name by Jewish-American novelist and screenwriter David Loeb Goodis—a cinephile fave that provided source material to various important directors, including Delmer Daves, Jacques Tourneur, Sam Fuller, and François Truffaut, among others—and thus has the pedigree of an eclectic cinephile’s wet dream. Attracted to the novel’s decidedly dark essence, Beineix described it as, “A totally negative story, very black, it was a dark journey with flashes of light, shimmers, glows … There was also the eruption of a particular embodiment of woman, that girl who arrives in that car, it really was the myth of the femme fatale at its purest … And then there was gnawing doubt, jealousy … In short, lots of things which affect the unconscious.” Indeed, one of the film’s greatest attributes is its ominous and oppressive oneiric essence, as the viewer is engulfed in the antihero played by Gérard Depardieu’s perversely paranoid unconscious as he grapples with his beloved late-sister’s rape-turned-suicide and the sensual charms of an almost otherworldly femme fatale portrayed by Nastassja Kinski. A film that practically reeks of tacky designer perfume, stale piss, rank pussy, and cheap beer where the Nietzschean sense of the ‘eternal feminine’ reigns supreme, The Moon in the Gutter is a film that, unlike the director’s previous big hit Diva (1981)—an enthralling exercise in action-packed style that, rather unfortunately, succumbs to quixotic xenophilia and an exceedingly embarrassing sort of racial fetishism—is hardly politically correct and is set in a wayward ghetto realm of evil obese negress stepmothers and lonely synagogue-side-suicides. In fact, instead of subscribing to some trendy quasi-marxist message like frog filmmakers from the previous generation, Beineix strived to make a completely apolitical flick, even once stating, “I am not interested in political or philosophical demonstrations, they are too simplistic. In LA LUNE DANS LE CANIVEAU there is a contrast between poverty and wealth, but it is resolved in a common distress, which is a metaphysical distress where the social divide is no longer operable.” Or, to quote the auteur again as referenced in Phil Powrie’s insightful text Jean-Jacques Beineix (2001), “I wanted to make the subconscious materialize on the screen. I didn’t want to be in the service of logic, of reality.” Exceedingly stylish, sensual, steamy, surreal and even sophisticatedly sleazy, the film is thankfully not completely senseless despite whatever certain spiritually and/or culturally cucked film critics had to say when the film was originally released.

 A virtual cinematic drug, The Moon in the Gutter is a film that, not unlike Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) or Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985), one need not remember the plot for it to be one of the most memorable movie experiences of your life. In fact, not unlike Scott and Gilliam’s flicks, I probably could not give a coherent description of the film’s storyline the first couple times I saw it, as to do such a thing seems almost redundant and completely missing the point (notably, somewhat ironically, the film has sort of intentionally redundant narration, as if Beineix reluctantly included it at the behest of the studio). After all, one is not compelled to critique a dream for its supposed incoherence, yet The Moon in the Gutter is hardly incoherent (in fact, the storyline is, relatively speaking, fairly simple) and it is certainly more accessible than most of David Lynch’s greatest films (and, of course, most cinephiles will probably be tempted to compare it to Eraserhead (1977) and Blue Velvet (1986), though that would largely be pointless). In short, the film is, first and foremost, an understatedly phantasmagoric experience of the ruthlessly romantic yet ultimately demystifying sort where a seriously messed up man is in both literal and figurative reach of his greatest dream in the form of a dream girl from a dream world where the air doesn’t smell like a sort of slightly fishy salty semen and things like self-respect and dignity have actual currency. 

 While I cannot say I have had the luxury of being with a real rich bitch or true blueblooded aristocrat, my experience is that, the higher social class a chick, the more innately insufferable and sensually sterile she is, thus I can understand the hatred for bourgeois or—more specifically—the sapless (upper)middleclass that fears the smell of human bodies and always puts material wealth above culture and security over love and affection. In fact, out of all the women I have been with, the poorest and most low-class was also the most loving, affectionate, and sexual and she is probably the one I most regret fucking things up with, but I digress. In The Moon in the Gutter, tough street frog Gérard Delmas (Gérard Depardieu, who would later trash the film by referring to it as, “The Film in the Gutter”)—a moody and broody stevedore from a decidedly dysfunctional white trash family that includes a rather abusive uppity negro stepmother—finds himself the reluctant object of desire in a bizarre love triangle involving his main whore-cum-stepsister Bella (Victoria Abril in a role originally given to Robert De Niro's high yellow then-wife Diahnne Abbott) and the wealthy yet wild woman of his dreams Loretta (Nastassja Kinski). Unfortunately, Gérard is pretty mentally perturbed and not quite in the soundest of minds to make such a big romantic decision as he has a pathological obsession with finding the malevolent mystery man that raped his beloved sister Catherine (Katya Berger)—a virginal beauty that was apparently too pure for the pernicious lumpenprole world that ultimately destroyed her—who immediately committed suicide with the protagonist’s shaving razor. Indeed, the titular moon in the gutter is reflected via Catherine’s ruby red blood in the dark slimy alley where she abruptly committed self-slaughter in a perversely poetic scene that finds great beauty in ungodly human brutality.  While technically a neo-noir flick, The Moon in the Gutter—a film that, aside from a couple scenes, was shot entirely in a studio—brings a certain preternatural glamour to the gritty as if god himself decided to polish the demented dirty work of his misbegotten (sub)human creations.

 Not surprisingly considering Gérard’s obvious incestuous feelings for his dead lil sis, both Bella and Loretta look vaguely similar to Catherine to the point where the three could be sisters (in a drunken dream-sequence of the borderline necrophiliac sort, the protagonist has a somewhat erotic encounter with Catherine’s unclad corpse at the morgue, only to discover Loretta's face on said corpse). Gérard is even convinced that his alcoholic brother Frank (Dominique Pinon)—a small and grotesque frog that seems like the genetically accursed consequence of France's Alpinid majority's virtual genocide of the Huguenots—was responsible for raping Catherine, but one almost gets the sense that the protagonist is merely projecting his own sense of guilt. After all, Catherine was raped after she fled a hospital as a result of Gérard asking her, “Now you dress like a hooker?” after she went to the trouble to dress nicely for him and borrow a white dress after he was injured at work, hence the protagonist's undying guilt. Undoubtedly, Gérard’s pathological paranoia eventually rubs off onto the viewer to the point where one cannot help but even suspect the protagonist of the crime. Notably, quite unlike the mysterious murder of Laura Palmer on Twin Peaks, the crime is never solved but it is almost irrelevant as The Moon in the Gutter is first and foremost a uniquely uncanny mood piece where dark dreams and repressed desires are one and the same. A miserably melancholic man that lives in a nightmare, Gérard is ultimately unable to embrace his dreams even though, rather improbably, they are practically served to him on a shiny silver platter.

Somewhat intriguingly, Gérard finds a wealthy counterpart in the form of nihilistic drunk named Newton Channing (Vittorio Mezzogiorno) who also happens to be the brother of darling dream femme Loretta. While Gérard has been left with an indelible internal wound as a result of the rape and suicide of his little sister, Newton also suffers inwardly in isolation, even while technically in the company of others, as a result of killing both his parents in an intentional car wreck that involved him insanely driving his white BMW into a big rig truck. As Bella states to Gérard in regard to Newton, “He’s weird… He doesn’t like himself” and he has decided to start lurking in the local Mikado Bar—the protagonist’s virtual second home—because he can, “...play games the rich don’t allow. Anything goes here.” As with virtually every other male character featured in the film, Gérard initially suspects that Newton, who he competes with in a bizarre ice-eating contest, might be his sister’s rapist, but instead the rich playboy unwittingly provides him with the literal/figurative girl of his dreams—a voluptuous beauty that is like both a dream lover and substitute sister—in the form of his own sister. Indeed, being his self-described “Guardian Angel,” Loretta—a gal so glamorous that wind seems to be always blowing in her hair—arrives at the Mikado Bar to pick Newton up and encounters ungentlemanly gentleman Gérard as a result.

Undoubtedly, the initial encounter between Gérard and Loretta recalls the Nietzsche poem “Accidentally a Seducer” that reads, “He shot an empty word…Into the empty blue; But on the way it met…A woman whom it slew,” as the protagonist spouts nonsense yet seems to cause the little lady to fall in love with him at first sight. Indeed, when Gérard half-jokingly gives Loretta his address after inviting her to dinner, Loretta actually shows up at the preposterous time of 2 a.m. in her fancy convertible beside a billboard that all-too-symbolically reads “TRY ANOTHER WORLD.” From there, Loretta takes the protagonist on a ride to the docks where she practically offers him a dream life with a dream girl—an almost preposterously paradisaical prospect that simply seems too unbelievable to such a terminally miserable man—and even attempts to talk him out of his gloomy defeatism, stating, “I frighten you! One day you’ll tell me. You’ll open your heart. You’ll see blue skies. A highway to the sun. Ships like birds… Gentleness… You won’t be frightened… Things’ll be fine. No one is doomed.” Instead of accepting Loretta’s quite glowingly warm embrace, Gérard literally turns his back on her and then once again visits the sad site of his sister’s murder as if to rationalize his own infuriatingly idiotic rejection of virtual romantic bliss.

While Gérard initially rebuffs Loretta’s rather bold romantic advances in an oftentimes obnoxious and even aggressive fashion, he eventually gives in, dresses virtually like Newton with a fancy suit and slicked back hair, and even marries the dream dame at an extra eerie gothic cathedral where the priest absurdly declares “Faith isn’t a matter of size” in regard to dildo-like Virgin Mary statues that are sold at the church. Needless to say, Bella—a fiery prole femme and assumed prostitute that, at one point, attempts to stab the hero with a broken bottle just because she suspects he might be cheating on her—does not take too kindly to the dubious mixed-class marriage and plots with Gérard’s pathetic dipsomaniac brother Frank to have the protagonist brutally murdered. Indeed, since life is cheap in the barf-and-feces-filled frog ghetto, Bella only has to pay a mere $100 to two ex-con thugs to have Gérard snuffed out, but the hired amateur assassins fail miserably as the protagonist has enough visceral pent-up hatred to give him the inspiration to virtually slaughter an entire army. When the protagonist confronts Bella by nonchalantly whipping out the $100 and declaring, “A guy’s life comes cheap. Here’s your money back,” she completely breaks down, practically denies culpability, and blames perennial fuck-up Frank. Naturally, Gérard decides fratricide is the answer and prepares to kill Frank, but Bella, who clearly genuinely loves the protagonist despite conspiring to kill him, attempts to stop him by telling him to leave town with Loretta, stating, “Don’t do it! Stay here! You’ll spoil everything! Listen…take your ride uptown. She’s waiting. You’re right, she loves you! Go away, never come back!” but he complains “I don’t deserve so much love.”  Of course, Gérard is the sort of self-destructive guy that likes doing things the hard way and is more interested in satisfying his deep-seated desire for bloodthirsty revenge than simply embracing the more sensible route of romantic rapture with his new wife Loretta.

Although Gérard proceeds to attempt to kill his brother in the very same gutter where his sister died using the same exact razor that she used to kill herself, he is stopped at the last minute when a local painter named Jésus (Bernard Farcy)—a painfully gawky art fag that loved Catherine so much that he painted her portrait—hits him over the head with a bottle and declares, “You’re crazy! You know…he didn’t do it.” In the end, Loretta finds Gérard at the site of the suicide and softly cries, “I’m cold,” but their surreal storybook romance is not meant to be and the hero ultimately goes back to his main brown bitch Bella. Indeed, as the narrator states at the end of the film, “Gérard dreamed of a white city…of proper blinds, shady lanes…hidden tennis courts, smooth lawns… He heard the sound of fountains, of birds singing. But he was afraid of that city…of feeling out of place…of that opening door… And the woman waiting for him.” 

 In an excerpt that would certainly confound Marxist materialists, Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “He is now poor, but not because everything has been taken from him, but because he has thrown everything away:—what does he care? He is accustomed to find new things.—It is the poor who misunderstand his voluntary poverty.” And, indeed, it is the ‘poor’ that will be confused by Gérard's decision in the end, as if it is better to be a rich automaton and married to a virtual Victoria's Secret mannequin than being yourself and married to a wonderfully wanton woman that understands everything about you, including your insatiable masculine appetite (indeed, it is no coincidence that Gérard immediately declares that he is “hungry” upon coming back to Bella in the end).  Far from unconventionally picturesque ‘poverty porn,’ The Moon in the Gutter demonstrates that home is where the heart is, even if you live in a sort of nasty neo-Sodom hellhole.

Over a decade ago, my long-time girlfriend at the time, who expressed more love and passion than a dozen ‘normal’ basic bitch white girls combined, once told me that, if we ever broke up, she would eventually randomly show up unannounced at my house and assumedly cause chaos with whatever girl I might be with in a dramatic attempt to get me back. While this girlfriend, who both physically and psychologically resembled the eponymous babe portrayed by Béatrice Dalle in Betty Blue, never did this (in fact, she is currently married with a kid), sometimes I feel like I’m still waiting for her to arrive.  After all, as devastatingly depicted in Maurice Pialat's classic anti-romantic We Won't Grow Old Together (1972) aka Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, it is oftentimes not until someone finally leaves your life that you realize what you have truly lost. In that sense, I somewhat suspect that if I saw The Moon in the Gutter when we were together and realized what we had (and understood her oftentimes warranted rage, which was not unlike Bella’s, as an irrational yet well-meaning expression of her love), I might not have senselessly sabotaged our relationship but, as obnoxious boomers and bourgeois people sometimes say, hindsight is 20/20.

Despite its almost ominously oneiric essence as dreamlike film filled with dream-sequences and pseudo-dream-sequences where a mensch is confronted with a dream girl and dream life, Beineix's butchered masterpiece is, in my mind, ultimately a film about embracing reality and appreciating those individuals—no matter how irreparably fucked up—that actually love you as opposed to fantasizing about idealized phantasmagoric femmes that will never exist in any tangible reality. While Nastassja Kinski’s character Loretta Channing technically does not do anything evil like attempting to get the protagonist killed (while, rather ironically, the protagonist's true love Bella does), she is still a femme fatale in a sort of figurative and symbolic sense as she puts Gérard on a precarious path that leads to the death of authenticity and selfhood (which, not coincidentally, is Loretta’s spiritually necrotic bourgeois brother Newton’s main objective, hence why he gets engaged to a nearly-ancient and, in turn, infertile, prostitute). Undoubtedly, The Moon in the Gutter is probably the only noir-ish film I can think where the femme fatale is not someone you to learn to hate, thereupon making her seem all the more preternaturally sinister on retrospect, especially on subsequent viewings of the film.

While the general storyline of The Moon in the Gutter is finally burned into my brain after multiple viewings, it will forever remain, most importantly, a cinematic drug of delirious lovelorn lunacy and paranoiac intrigue for me where—not unlike F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), Jean Vigo’s L'Atalante (1934), and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner—I watch for the not-altogether-mindless drugless high that sends me into a bittersweet deluge of emotions that ranges from romantic nostalgia to a sort of hypnotic regretful heartsickness, among other things. As to auteur Beineix’s main method in accomplishing this delectable dream cinema, he once noted, “I sought to make the real a bit unreal and vice versa so as to place the whole thing half-way between dream and reality. To take an example we colored the smoke coming out of a chimney-stack.” Of course, whereas Francis Ford Coppola failed terribly with his would-be-romantic exercise of absurdly ambitious artificiality One from the Heart (1982)—a film that was not a total failure in that it influenced Beineix to cast Nastassja Kinski—The Moon in the Gutter manages the conjure the darkly soulful and archetypically sound in a film where most characters are virtual ciphers and artifice acts as a sort of cockeyed spiral stairway to the primordial truth, at least as far as sex and romance are concerned and, in that sense, it could not be more immaculately (not to mention aesthetically pleasingly) titled.

In describing his artistic objective with the film, Beineix once confessed his intent was to create a completely new cinematic language, remarking, “I asked myself what the essence of cinema was, what was the language of the image. I sought another dimension of this language. The cinema is not necessarily at the service of a story, in other words chronology and reality; it is perhaps also at the service of matter.” While it is questionable as to whether or not he truly accomplished this (notably, pseudo-arthouse hack Olivier Assayas of all people went so far as to write in Cahiers du cinéma that “…there is no film”), there is no denying that The Moon in the Gutter is a singular cinematic achievement and that Beineix would never again create something quite as aesthetically alluring, cinematically revolutionary, or endlessly engulfing. Indeed, while Betty Blue is an eccentrically epic amour fou masterpiece and Roselyne and the Lions (1989) aka Roselyne et les lions manages to be both classically romantic and carnally carnival-esque, they just cannot compete with the strangely cold blue ‘heat’ that practically radiates from the screen of the deceptively darkly romantic celluloid dream that is The Moon in the Gutter.  As for Beineix's latest and certainly least greatest features IP5: The Island of Pachyderms (1992) aka IP5: L'île aux pachydermes—an aesthetically excremental exercise in would-be-zany xenophilia and negrophilia with an ugly and would-be-triumphantly-morally-retarded unhinged untermench spirit—and Mortal Transfer (2001) aka Mortel transfert—a sometimes visually alluring yet ultimately vain and superficial genre-bender without brains—they are probably best left completely forgotten, as it pains one to be reminded that they were directed by the same dude that started his filmmaking career with three arguable masterpieces.

Not unlike Michael Powell with Peeping Tom (1960) and John Schlesinger with The Day of the Locust (1975), the critical and commercial failure of The Moon in the Gutter seems to have destroyed Beineix's artistic will as if he ultimately became too afraid to once again test the bounds of cinematic possibility. Largely unsung auteur Eckhart Schmidt (Der Fan, Alpha City)—a sort of Teutonic low-budget Beineix that also took a romantic anti-intellectual approach to cinema—attempted something similar the same year as The Moon in the Gutter with his underrated nocturnal celluloid nachtmahr Das Gold der Liebe (1983) aka The Gold Of Love, which is like a punk/new wave Dementia meets Eyes Wide Shut, but few other filmmakers have dared to take a similarly darkly dreamlike path lest they be accused of aesthetic (crypto)fascism or some nonsensical horseshit.  Needless to say, the cinematic neo-romanticism of Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer)—a protege of queer agitpropagandist Rosa von Praunheim of all people—seems like frivolous fluff when compared to Beineix's greatest films, hence his collaboration with the Wachowski weirdos.

Clearly working from sort of quasi-Freudian perspective, Phil Powrie sees the ending of The Moon in the Gutter as extremely negative and tragic, arguing, “Gérard’s crime is to have desired his sister, and therefore his mother. His punishment fits the crime: he will marry his stepsister and be hen-pecked by his stepmother, as his father was before him, the ideal Loretta forever refused so that he can continue to expiate incest and voluntary castration.” While Powrie has made a fairly good argument given the details of the film, my personal experience tells me otherwise and I am reminded of the Carl Jung quote, “May love be subject to torment, but not life. As long as love goes pregnant with life, it should be respected; but if it has given birth to life from itself it has turned into an empty sheath and expires into transience.”  Love aside, the film also deserves credit for rivaling Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) in terms of featuring what is probably the most shamelessly sensual and exquisitely beauteous female corpse in cinema history.  Indeed, when it comes down to it, I would not be surprised if both the public and critics alike still have not forgiven Beineix or The Moon in the Gutter—a film that should have a cult following that at least rivals any retarded slasher franchise—for providing the world with the most devilishly delectable of dead dames in a flavorsomely fucked film opening that reminds viewers of the unfortunate truth that sometimes women are just as hot when their bodies are cold. In that sense, if you ever needed evidence for the innate anti-aesthetic idiocy of the Bechdel bull-dyke test, Beineix's films, especially The Moon in the Gutter, nuke such flippant feministic pseudo-intellectual ordure altogether as one exquisite female corpse will always beat hundreds of ugly squawking hens.

-Ty E

La Bête Humaine

Genetic taints and evil loose women are two of my favorite cinematic subjects (and, of course, subjects in general), so it is only natural that La Bête Humaine (1938) aka The Human Beast aka Judas Was a Woman—a film that also belongs to my preferred frog cinema movement of ‘poetic realism’—is unquestionably my favorite Jean Renoir (The Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game) film; or so I just discovered this past week after watching the film for the very first time and joyously discovering a totally timeless and haunting romantic tragedy that reminded why thots kill. Indeed, featuring the ultimate femme fatale portrayed by Simone Simon—a little lady with the perfect femme fatale pedigree as a half-heeb/half-guido mischling with a rather revealing taste for less-than-handsome wealthy chosenites—the film undoubtedly sparked my less than latent misogyny and contempt for cold cunts that use their cunts as weapons. While Renoir’s masterpiece might be nearly ancient in terms of age, it is as fresh as a Mormon teenage girl in terms of offering forgotten perennial wisdom, which you will not find in contemporary cinema, in regard to the ways of women; or at least the sort of woman that is a true whore and beyond any sort of redemption when it comes to love. A rare cinematic example of the degeneration theories of Judaic proto-eugenicists Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau where a scheming whore meets her match in the form of a genetically forsaken train engineer that is plagued with sexually homicidal tendencies due to being the degenerate descendant of countless hardcore dipsomaniacs, La Bête Humaine—a film that is more or less an extremely abridged adaptation of the 1890 Émile Zola novel of the same name—is also a grim yet gorgeous celluloid love letter to love, sex, death, and locomotives where man and machine almost seem to become one in terms of visceral intensity of libido. While the film does not feature a literal train wreck, the film’s protagonist’s cataclysmic demise is certainly an apt substitute as he literally and figuratively kills his love and then himself in the end after succumbing to the contrived charms of a cunty conniving succubus. 

 By sheer happenstance, I watched La Bête Humaine for the first time only days before watching the documentary Maurice Pialat: Love Exists (2007) where criminally unsung French auteur Maurice Pialat (À Nos Amours, Under the Sun of Satan)—a new personal favorite who, in terms of unmasking the nasty nuances of humanity, is like a sort of heterosexual frog Fassbinder—credits Renoir’s masterpiece as influencing his decision to become a filmmaker, stating, “The film that made me realize…I guess you could call it a vocation…It was the film that, at that time, oddly…We’d see a film one, never twice. But this one I saw 3 or 4 times. It was Renoir’s LA BÊTE HUMAINE.” In the same doc, Pialat also expresses his love and admiration for Renoir’s technically-unfinished 40-minute featurette A Day in the Country (1946) aka Partie de champagne. As a recently devout Pialat fan, I am not surprised by his assessment of Renoir’s work as these two films express a purity of aesthetic spirit and sort of perverse poetic humanistic realism that certainly transcends the director’s more famous flicks like The Grand Illusion (1937), The Rules of the Game (1939), and The River (1951). In fact, even Renoir’s The Southerner (1945)—a sort of proto-neorealist exercise that was heavily influenced by the documentary work of New Deal propagandist Pare Lorentz and Robert Flaherty—does not come close to these films in terms of presenting certain archetypal truths. Depicting the ultimate femme fatale from hell in a petite doll-like form, La Bête Humaine is a beauteously bleak bittersweet tragedy where forsaken genetic destiny and feminine evil collide and ultimately cancel each other out in an almost ironical fashion. While Renoir’s film contains a fairly simple yet sensually-charged (anti)love story that would make for a nice subplot on Twin Peaks, it is ultimately a timeless tale about the miserable absurdity of human relationships, especially of the ‘romantic’ sort where the hopelessly despoiled conspiring whore finally meets her match in the murderously passionate male genetic degenerate. In short, the central ‘couple’ was practically made for one another in the worst sort of way in what seems like a sick joke of fate. 

 Notably, in her magnum opus Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), Camille Paglia—a virtual degenerate dago dyke Spengler—remarks in regard to male’s greatest weakness, “Love is the spell by which he puts his sexual fear to sleep.” Despite knowing full well that he gets the homicidal urge to strangle women to death when sexually aroused, La Bête Humaine protagonist Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin)—a strong and stoic workaholic that is able to repress his well-hidden deep-seated sadness via his virtual lust for train work—makes the mistake of a lifetime by falling in love with a married harlot named Séverine Roubaud (Simone Simon) who he knows full well was involved in a murder. The bastard broad of a lecherous maid, Séverine—a pernicious pedomorphic parasite that lives off bad men yet then has the audacity to cry for herself when said bad men treat her badly—certainly has a stereotypical whore background and her involvement in the robbery-cum-murder of her wealthy godfather, ‘Grandmorin’ (Jacques Berlioz), was partly a means to appease the undying jealously of her rather pathetic husband Roubaud (Fernand Ledoux). Indeed, when Roubaud discovers that his beloved moonfaced wife is a serial liar and that she did not disclose the fact that she was being defiled by Grandmorin (who the film hints may actually be her biological father) when she was still just a little girl before the two got married (as he reasonably remarks, he did not realize his was marrying an “old man’s cast-off”), he irrationally decides robbing and killing the old fart will somehow help him deal with his murderously malicious jealousy. Rather ironically, instead of dissolving his jealousy, the coldblooded killing of Grandmorin leads to Roubaud’s flagrant cuckolding as Séverine is forced to utilize her fierce femme fatale wiles on the film’s hapless yet hearty hero Jacques Lantier as he is a passive witness at the scene of the crime. Unfortunately for Séverine, Lantier is a man with a genetic taint that causes him to ‘see red’ when sexually aroused and the femme fatale might not have many talents but she does know how to prime a guy's pump. 

 In what proves to be the perfect setting for an inordinately fluidly moving and rhythmically immaculate film, the murder of Grandmorin takes place on a train. As a man of such fiery passions, it is quite fitting that Lantier is a train engineer, though his co-worker Roubaud—a somewhat sad and pathetic fellow with a degree of superficial charm and certain antisocial qualities—might not be the best choice for deputy stationmaster at Le Havre. While Roubaud clearly cares more about his wanton wife Séverine than his job, Lantier is so proud of his job that he describes his train as his “wife,” even stating quite joyously, “I’m already married to Lison. She’s good enough for me.” Of course, Lantier has good reason to prefer his work to any sort of woman, as he nearly strangles to death an (ex)lover named Flore (Blanchette Brunoy)—a voluptuous blonde beauty that rather enjoys mocking men sans the protagonist—near the beginning of the film as the two attempt to make love on a grassy hill. Rather symbolically, it is only when a train passes by that Lantier falls out of his homicidal haze and releases poor Flore (who is not nearly as nice in Émile Zola’s source novel) from his seemingly demonic grip. As Lantier explains to Flore in regard to the strange nature of his aberrant actions, “I didn’t even know what I was doing […] It’s like this haze fills my head and twists everything out of shape. I start feeling like a mad dog. I never drink, mind you. Even a drop and I go crazy. I feel like I’m paying for all those fathers and grandfathers who drank. All those generations of drunkards who poisoned my blood and saddled me with this madness. It’s a terrible thing. But I love you with all my heart. So much that I was afraid to come here.” Despite nearly killing her, Flore still expresses her desire to marry Lantier, but the protagonist seems to love her too much to put her in such a precarious predicament where every potential sex act could bring more literal meaning to the French phrase La petite mort. Needless to say, succubus Séverine—a deceptively cutesy ice queen that practically drenches men with perfumic pussy juice with her mere sweet-eye glance—makes for a more fitting lover for lady-killer Lantier, especially after she attempts to get him to kill her husband and thus loses any marginal degree of empathy the viewer might have originally granted her. 

Not only is Séverine a superlatively salacious slut that has no qualms about getting involved in the coldblooded killing of a godfather that apparently provided her much materially, but she also seems to really bask in such sadistic seductress savagery as demonstrated by the fact that she slyly smirks while stating, “There must be a way to win over a fellow like that” after coming to the instinctual decision to seduce Lantier and, in turn, cheat on her husband. Of course, considering her almost vampiric good-looks, Séverine—a virtual proto-goth girl that knows how to drain a man of both his emotional and ejaculatory juices—does not have to do much to completely seduce Lantier despite the fact that the protagonist is fully aware that she and her husband were responsible for the dubious demise of Grandmorin. In fact, even when a goofy poor prole named Cabuche (Jean Renoir in the most unforgettable acting role of his career) is charged with the murder, Lantier still cannot bring himself to tell the truth as sassy slut Séverine has already completely invaded his mind and compromised his godforsaken soul. As more than hinted by an unforgettable scene where Lantier and Séverine have a long coital session in a muddy shack that symbolizes the purity (or lack thereof) of their unsavory union, the two seem to have great sexual chemistry so it is only natural that their uniquely ungodly romance eventually concludes with the most permanent of releases. 

 Not merely satisfied with simply cuckolding her long-suffering husband, Séverine soon conspires to have Lantier kill Roubaud. Indeed, Séverine dubiously promises to be Lantier’s wifey if he kills her husband, as if she would not do the same exact thing to him in the future if she got the chance. The most shamelessly flagrant of femme fatales, Séverine even follows Lantier—a fairly uncomplicated man that sentimentally dreams of a simple future where he comes home from work everyday to a wife that loves him—along and provides him with inspirational kisses on his first failed attempt to kill Roubaud. Of course, Lantier does not want to kill Roubaud and when his conscience gets the best of him only seconds before he is about to bash in the brains of the stationmaster during a quiet night at the tracks, Séverine immediately expresses her dissatisfaction by disappearing into the night like a runaway Maenad looking for a new victim. Fully committed to becoming a young widow, Séverine immediately begins using various forms of manipulation to inspire Lantier to kill, including openly flirting with much younger men and saying contrived melodramatic bullshit like, “There’s no way forward for us now. We can’t go any further. Tomorrow will be just like yesterday: the same grief and sorrow. It doesn’t really matter. What happens, happens.” Not unlike most women, it is hard to tell if Séverine is telling the truth or merely strategically exploiting some manipulative distortion of the truth, but she does seem to be expressing some honesty when she remarks to Lantier, “We should have stayed like we were in the beginning, when we loved each other but didn’t pursue it. You remember those innocent walks we used to take? They helped me forget about Grandmorin. When you’ve experienced all the disgusting things I knew as a young girl, it’s madness to hope for a true love of your own.” Indeed, aside from revealing the female tendency toward embracing escapism at all costs when being confronted with even the slightest degree of discomfort, Séverine’s remark hints at the incapacity for a whore to actually truly love someone. Just like Grandmorin and Roubaud, Lantier would be nothing more than a means to an end for Séverine were he to carry out the killing. Luckily, a genetic taint intervenes and Séverine’s venomous vaginal menace is eradicated from the world. 

 Rather interestingly, in his classic (yet scientifically dubious) text Degeneration (1892) aka Entartung, pioneering Zionist theorist and eugenicist Max Nordau argues that genetic degeneration is a sort of self-solving problem as degenerates do not tend to reproduce. Undoubtedly, this can certainly be said of protagonist Lantier and his beloved femme fatale Séverine. Aside from randomly impulsively murdering Séverine in her bed instead of her husband (as he originally intended), Lantier is so consumed with lovesick grief and guilt that he soon commits suicide by jumping off his beloved train Lison, thus leaving his best friend and co-worker Pecqueux (Julien Carette) behind to pick up the pieces. Shortly after committing the killing and before arriving at work to eventually commit suicide, Lantier—like a train that has derailed and is about to smash into eternity—forcefully treads down the train tracks in an unforgettable scene that anticipates the similarly bleak conclusion of Peter Lorre’s sole directorial effort The Lost One (1951) aka Der Verlorene. Not unlike Lorre’s character, Lantier is a virtual walking and talking ghost after killing his lover and thus his suicide seems like not much more than an incidental detail from a tragic wasted life. As Pecqueux remarks while looking at the corpse of his dead comrade, “Poor guy. How he must have suffered to come to this. I haven’t seen him look so peaceful in a long time.” Notably, Lantier’s corpse is found in a place near train tracks that looks strikingly similar to where the protagonist almost strangled to death his (ex)lover Flore at the beginning of the film in a poetic scene that underscores the tragically accursed nature of his love life; or literal La petite mort. 

 While La Bête Humaine has many simple (yet perennial) themes, one of the more obvious yet easily overlooked ones is the incapacity of man and woman ever becoming one despite the seemingly indomitable force of attraction that might have initially thrust them together. Indeed, as Pecqueux wisely states to Lantier, “Love is best early on, before you know each other well, when you’re both on your best behavior.” Of course, had Lantier actually killed Roubaud and gotten away with it, sinful slut Séverine would have no need to be on her best behavior and would probably immediately begin cuckolding the protagonist as being a homicidally hypergamic ho is, of course, her recklessly whorish nature as the femme fatale par excellence. In that sense, Séverine is the ugly extreme of femininity and, in turn, one of cinema’s greatest archetypical villainesses. As for Lantier, he is a sad symbol of male naïvety when it comes to the so-called fairer sex and the potentially deadly blinding that comes with love. As La Bête Humaine rather viscerally reveals, it only takes one woman to come along to destroy a happy man that has passionately mastered a trade—not coincidentally, a trade that no woman could ever master (which is something Renoir really underscores during the film's unforgettably triumphant opening scene where Gabin's character looks quite joyously glorious as he operates the train as if it is an extension of both his body and soul). Of course, human progress is largely the story of man’s instinctual desire to impress women, yet it is ironically oftentimes women or womanly men (read: Weininger) that impedes this progress. While La Bête Humaine does not express the sentiment that a man should find a woman that inspires and supports his work and evolution as an artist or artisan, the film certainly reveals the sort of woman one must avoid: the whore; or the reproductively retrograde harpy that uses her sex as a deleterious weapon for infantile person gain. 

 As Paglia noted in regard to the sort of cuntcentric creature that La Bête Humaine delightfully depicts, “The femme fatale can appear as Medusan mother or as frigid nymph, masquing in the brilliant luminosity of Apollonian high glamour. Her cool unreachability beckons, fascinates, and destroys. She is not a neurotic but, if anything, a psychopath. That is, she has an amoral affectlessness, a serene indifference to the suffering of others, which she invites and dispassionately observes as tests of her power.” Personally, I can say that virtually every single woman that I have ever ‘known’ embodied these anti-qualities to some degree at some point, for the femme fatale, not unlike like male lust killer, is just the ultimate ugly extreme of feminine evil personified. As to why one might want to rethink the opportunity to fuck a whore—no matter how hopelessly hot—Paglia offered some unsettling food for thought when she wrote, “I follow Freud, Nietzsche, and Sade in my view of the amorality of the instinctual life. At some level, all love is combat, a wrestling with ghosts. We are only for something by being against something else. People who believe they are having pleasant, casual, uncomplex sexual encounters, whether with friend, spouse, or stranger, are blocking from consciousness the tangle of psychodynamics at work, just as they block the hostile clashings of their dream life. Family romance operates at all times. The femme fatale is one of the refinements of female narcissism, of the ambivalent self-directedness that is completed by the birth of a child or by the conversion of spouse or lover into child.” Undoubtedly, La Bête Humaine depicts a sort of idealized version of the femme fatale that has enough agency in terms of carefully calculating her kills, but the modern-day world seems plagued with a new sort of degenerate whore (of the usually Cluster B sort) that, completely incapable of love (let alone keeping a man), uses her body to defile as many men as possible as a sort of pathetic substitute for a real relationship (as if a bloated ‘body count’ is not an expression of self-hatred/self-annihilation, at least for women). Of course, just like the archetypical femme fatale, this tragic degenerated ‘failed femme fatale’ will bring chaos and destruction to your life, albeit of the totally nonsensical nihilistic sort. 

 Notably, near the end of his autobiography My Life and My Films (1974), Jean Renoir notes while singling out some of his best films, “Whether the setting is natural, or imitates Nature, or is deliberately artificial, is of little importance. I used external truth in so-called ‘realistic’ films like LA CHIENNE and LA BÊTE HUMAINE, and apparently total artificiality in films like LA PETITE MARCHANDE D’ ALLUMETTES and LE CARROSSE D’OR. I have spent my life experimenting with different styles, but it all comes down to this: my different attempts to arrive at the inward truth, which for me is the only one that matters.” And, undoubtedly, La Bête Humaine certainly achieves this truth in a manner that, not unlike Nietzsche’s philosophizing with a hammer, is akin to the raw rhythmic precision of a locomotive in Mussolini’s Italy and does so with a stark brutalism that makes it hard to believe it was directed by the same auteur that dreamed up the singularly goofy and relatively lighthearted Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932). While a penetratingly pessimistic film for its time, the romantic realm nowadays certainly resembles something more in tune with Delphic delirium and purgatorial paranoia of André Delvaux’s masterpiece One Night... a Train (1968) aka Un Soir, un Train where, among other things, a surreal apocalyptic nightmare scenario offers a temporary reprieve from a catastrophic train accident. Still, despite its age and relation to the present, Renoir’s film is an all-around decided downer and a film that even transcends the auteur's previous masterpiece La Chienne (1931) aka The Bitch—a film so unforgettably stark and pessimistic that Fritz Lang remade it as the film noir Scarlet Street (1945)—in terms of devastating anti-romantic dejection. 

 In his excellent tome Jean Renoir: A Biography (2012), French film critic Pascal Mérigeau underscores the all-encompassingly forsaken spirit of the film when he notes that, “Of all the films directed by Renoir in the thirties, LA BÊTE HUMAINE is the one that could be said to resemble a film by Renoir the least […] In choosing to ascribe Lantier’s wound to heredity, as announced by a quotation from the Zola novel at the beginning of the film, the director evokes a fate that at the time would stick to Gabin’s roles one-screen, condemning to certain death some of the characters he played. Stretching from Pepel in THE LOWER DEPTHS to Jacques Lantier in LA BÊTE HUMAINE are all the hopes born of the Popular Front and abandoned along the way, and everything Renoir liked to believe, or pretended to want to believe. That dark fate is shared with the other main characters […] Never in Renoir’s work has fate had such crushing weight. Lantier cannot stand it, and he kills himself by throwing himself off the top of la Lison as it is running at top speed, whereas in the novel Pecqueux and he kill each other. ‘They’ll be found without heads or feet, two bloody trunks still pressed together, as if to suffocate each other.’”

At the risk of sounding like a humorless philistine, one of the reasons I liked La Bête Humaine so much and was totally shocked by it is because its totally devoid of the sort of the satirical silliness that one expects from a Renoir flick (in fact, the only goofy aspect of the film is Renoir's admittedly quite humorous performance as a bombastic boor).  Of course, the fact that Renoir opted to not use some of the more darker elements of Zola's source novel and changing of Lantier's death from brutal murder to guilt-ridden sucide reveals how much of a hopeless humanist that the filmmaker really was.  Aditionally, there is no doubt that the film owes much of its pathos and melancholic intensity to lead Jean Gabin as demonstrated by the actor's similar perturbingly potent performances in classic films like Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937) and Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938) aka Le Quai des brumes, among various other examples.  Naturally, being a great artist, Renoir was even great when dealing with subjects and moods that were not exactly innate as the La Bête Humaine underscores (and, as Nietzsche noted, there is “praise in choice” as “The artist chooses his subjects; that is his mode of praising,” hence Renoir's use of Zola's nasty novel).  As to Renoir's support of idiotic leftist politics, Nietzsche also offered a clue when he wrote, “Liberality is often only a form of timidity in the rich.”  Luckily, Renoir was not timid when it came to whores and genetic taints.

As to the value of a film like Renoir's in our certainly more degenerate and gynocentric age where virtually every form of sexual sickness is celebrated by everything from public schools to multinational corporations and virtually every aspect of society is meant to appeal to the petty whims and wants of female narcissism while normal heterosexual male behaviors are routinely pathologized and treated as grotesquely criminal, I am reminded of Paglia's words, “The more nature is beaten back in the west, the more the femme fatale reappears, as a return of the repressed. She is the spectre of the West's bad conscience about nature. She is the moral ambiguity of nature, a malevolent moon that keeps breaking through our fog of hopeful sentiment.” In a world where the dumb fictional dragon bitch of Game of Thrones is celebrated as a hero among grown wine-addled women, a sapless modern witch like Elizabeth Warren is a serious presidential candidate, and a half-retarded autist-cum-downsie like Greta Thunberg is taken seriously by the U.N., a classic femme fatale like the one portrayed by Simone Simon seems almost refreshing. Luckily, as Paglia also notes, “Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be ‘fixed’ by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society.” After all, there will always be femme fatales like the one featured in La Bête Humaine, but Warren and Thunberg are special aberrations that come with an absurdly abnormal repressed society of the morally and culturally inverted sort where the complete transvaluation of values has made the tranny queen and the culture-distorting ex-ghetto-dweller king.  In that sense, it is better to become a happy victim of an old school femme fatale like Simon than live in a world where fecund-free feminist feces like Ghostbusters (2016) exists.

-Ty E