Give the French their due. They see an American genre wussing out, and they don’t just sit back and snarkez-vous. Take torture porn. (Please. *ahem*) Eli Roth, Hostel? Wuss-tacular. Let’s have Betty Blue try and get the fetus from a pregnant woman trapped in her home. Let’s have Monica Bellucci’s weird-looking boyfriend play inbreeding hicks (both genders!) enacting some barely-explicable satanic ritual on Parisian hipster douchebags.
Or let’s have Pascal Laugier crib from that pissant Roth’s premise (a vague industrial-capitalist conspiracy to torture unsuspecting victims for some nefarious purpose) and run it through an existentialist blender, squeeze out the lurid voyeuristic thrills which Roth exploited (*ahem*) in his occasionally-funny Hostels. Whereas Roth’s films with manic glee turn the audience into accomplices, Laugier imagines no pleasure but a deep philosophical purpose.
I’d say I’m spoiling the film, but none of you will see it, and I’m not sure I’d really recommend it, and it’s probably not spoilable, really. This ain’t M. Night Shymalan, and while we toil in relative confusion for the first half of the film, unsure what’s going on, the shift from a bleak revengeploitation film into a bleak psychosploitation “tragedy” of the afflictions suffered by a former victim of torture AND THEN into a bleak enactment of said torture … well, it’s not like anyone is sitting in their chair going–holy SHIT (“sacre merde!”), I did NOT see that coming. You don’t see “it” coming, but the degradation and ultimate painful destruction of the protagonists is a foregone conclusion.
The film has a visceral effectiveness, particularly in its first third. In the prologue, a young girl escapes from some unnamed facility, horribly abused; we see newsreel footage of her in an orphanage, her burgeoning friendship with another young girl, cops circling the mystery of what happened to her. End cold with a scary creature seeming to break into her room… and we then see a bourgeois family, with great boring detail, having breakfast and bickering. 10 minutes later, that girl–now grown up–enters with a shotgun and blows ’em all away. This *does* have some relative surprise–after that boredom, you lose sight of what is going on, and stop wondering why you’re watching this family, so when she comes blasting in, it’s startling. You’d been lulled into watch-checking forgetfulness.
This seems to be Laugier’s m.o. in a nutshell: take the basic premises (revenge slaughter, psycho self-battle, horrible torture) and strip them of viewer pleasure. Make them painfully attentive to details. And this *can* be effective — the long drawn-out sequence at the end, where one young girl is tortured as preparation for her martyrdom, is not a brief lurid sequence with drills or hammer-claws or some Fangoria wetdream. Instead, she’s chained down, fed thin gruel, periodically and without pleasure beaten. Weeks pass. (Not literally. Or at least I’m pretty sure not literally.)
The object for the torturers is to use another’s suffering to try and attain that rare glimpse–seen in a few photos of those who’ve suffered and are about to die–of another world after death.
In other words, they’re torturing for information. I happen to be reading Jane Mayer’s account of the zealous embrace of torture by Bushies following 9/11, and this parallel narrative makes even more explicit what has been lurking around the edges of the torture-porn reboot of the last few years: these films enact the cultural anxieties around Abu Ghraib and “enhanced interrogation” and issues of complicity wrapped up in our fear of “others” and… so on. There is a grim smirk buried in Laugier’s conclusion–a refutation of the information provided. And in Laugier the primary victims are both recognizably immigrant–southeast Asian and North African, respectively–while their torturers are homogenously white and old and wealthy. There’s something interesting there… but I’m skeptical about that smirk. The filmmaker doesn’t produce in us–or seem to feel himself–that complicity, that weird sense of “wanting” the torture which the more gleeful and plain exploitative films might do, whether Saw or Hostel. Martyrs is exploitation with a thesis. It’s interesting to see the argument made explicit, but it’s not interesting to see the argument in such a film, nor really interesting to see this film. If you’re developing a thesis (*ahem*), maybe worth a glance. Otherwise… I think I prefer the crass to the meta-crass.